



Class ES. 

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES 

EDITED BY 

M. A. DeWOLFE HOWE 



WALT WHITMAN 

BY 

ISAAC HULL PLATT 




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WA LT WHITMAN 



ISAAC HULL PLATT 




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BOSTON 
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 

MCMIV 



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Copyright, 1904. 
By Small, Maynard & Company 

(Incorporated) 



Entered at Stationers' Hall 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 


Two Copies 


Keceived 


NOV 10 


1904 


Gopynjjiic Entry 
/ ?Uir. ' 0,1 qo */- 
CLASS /\ XXc. No: 

COPY B. 



Published November y iqo4 



Press of 

Geo. H. Ellis Co., 

Boston, U.S.A. 



The frontispiece to this volume is from a 
photograph by Sarony in 1879. Sarony 
made a number of portraits of Whitman, of 
! which this one, although perhaps the least 
7 Jcnown, seems to possess qualities which ren- 
; der it especially suitable for its present use. 
, Taken at the period when Whitman came 
nearest to a restoration to health after his 
; paralysis in 1873, it unites with the vener- 
able and patriarchal appearance of his later 
years much of the robustness of physique 
which is shown in his earlier portraits. The 
original photograph is in the Whitman col- 
lection of the late Dr. B. M. Bucke. The 
present engraving is by John Andrew &, 
Son, Boston. 




IN MEMORIAM 
RICHARD MAURICE BUCKE 



PBEFACE 

This little book is an attempt to bring into 
brief compass the salient features of the life 
of one who — whatever else may be claimed 
for or denied him — is among the most 
picturesque figures in American Letters. 
If it shall prove to be of aid to those who 
are curious in regard to Whitman's life and 
work or useful as an epitome to those who 
are already familiar with the subject, it will 
have done all that it is asked to do. 

While I have approached my task as 
an unqualified admirer of Whitman and a 
believer to the fullest extent in the greatness 
of his work, I, of course, recognize that 
there are other honest ways of looking at 
the subject, and that there are many people 
who admit his essential greatness in spite 
of certain elements in his work of which 
they do not approve, or which they even find 
offensive. Standing in the position I do, 
while I hope I have succeeded in making 
my critical remarks upon Whitman's work 



x PBEFACE* 

dispassionate, I feel sure that I have stated 
the facts of his life without prejudice. 

Among published books, in addition to 
the various editions of Whitman's works, 
I am principally indebted to Dr. Buckets 
"Walt Whitman, 11 John Burroughs' u Walt 
Whitman as Poet and Person" and his 
u Walt Whitman, a Study," William Sloane 
Kennedy's u Walt Wliitman," and the 
memorial volume u In Be Walt Whitman" 
which was edited by Whitman's literary 
executors. For personal advice and assist- 
ance I make my acknowledgments to Thomas 
B. Earned and Horace Traubel, the sur- 
viving literary executors of the poet, and to 
Laurens Maynard. To the latter I am in- 
debted especially for assistance in preparing 
the chronology and bibliography. 

ISAAC HULL PLATT. 

Wallingfobd, Pennsylvania, 
October 1, 1904. 



CHKONOLOGY 

1819 
May 31. Walt Whitman was born at 
West Hills, near Huntington, Long 
Island, New York. 

1823 
His family removed to Brooklyn. 

1825-32 
Attended the public schools of Brooklyn, 
working for a short time as errand-boy 
in a lawyer's office. 

1833-34 
Worked in Brooklyn printing-offices, 
learning the trade. 

1836-39 
Taught several terms in country schools 
on Long Island, after which he opened a 
printing-office in Huntington, Long Isl- 
and, starting a new weekly paper, The 
Long Islander (still published). 

1840-47 
Eeturned to New York, and worked at 



xii CHRONOLOGY 

printing. Spent several summers in the 
country at farm work. 
Published Franklin Evans in The New 
World (1841). 

Contributed essays and tales to The Dem- 
ocratic Review. 

1848 
Became editor of The Brooklyn Eagle. 

1848-49 
Started with his brother "Jeff" on a 
long working journey through the Middle 
and Southern States as far as New Or- 
leans, where he worked for some time 
on the editorial staff of The Crescent. 

1850-51 
Returned to Brooklyn, working his way 
back through the Northern States and 
Canada. 

Published a newspaper in Brooklyn, 
The Freeman. 

1851-54 
Worked with his father in Brooklyn, 
building and selling houses. 



CHRONOLOGY xiii 

1855 
Published first edition of Leaves of Grass 
(Brooklyn, New York, no publisher). 
July. Death of his father. 
July 21. Ealph Waldo Emerson wrote 
to him, praising the book. 

1856 
Visited in Brooklyn by Emerson, and 
later by Thoreau. 

Published second edition of Leaves of 
Grass (New York, no publisher). 

1860 
Visited Boston, and published third 
edition of Leaves of Grass (Boston, 
Thayer & Eldridge). 

1862 
Went to Fredericksburg (Virginia) to 
attend his brother George, wounded in 
battle. 

1862-65 
Remained at the army hospitals in and 
near Washington, ministering to the sick 
and wounded. 



xiv CHBONOLOGY 

1862-65 (continued) 
Became intimately acquainted with John 
Burroughs, William Douglas O'Connor, 
and Peter Doyle. 

1865 
Appointed to a clerkship in the Depart- 
ment of the Interior. 
June 30. Dismissed from his position 
by James Harlan, Secretary of the In- 
terior, " for having written an immoral 
book." 

Appointed immediately to another clerk- 
ship in the Attorney- General's office. 
September 2. William Douglas O' Connor 
published The Good Gray Poet, a defence 
of Whitman and an attack on Secretary 
Harlan. 

Published Drum Taps and Sequel to Drum 
Taps (New York, no publisher). 

1867 
Published fourth edition of Leaves of 
Grass (New York, no publisher). 
John Burroughs published Notes on Walt 
Whitman as Poet and Person, 



CHBONOLOGY xv 

1868 
William Michael Eossetti edited Poems 
of Walt Whitman for English publication 
(London, J. C. Hotten). 

1869 
June- July. Mrs. Anne Gilchrist wrote 
her letters to Eossetti, appreciations of 
Leaves of Grass. 

1871 
September 7. Bead poem at the opening 
of the American Institute at New York. 
Published this as After All, Not to Create 
Only (Boston, Eoberts Brothers). 
Published two brochures, Passage to India 
and Democratic Vistas (Washington, no 
publisher). 

Published fifth edition of Leaves of Grass 
(Washington, no publisher). 

1872 
June 26. Eead Commencement poem at 
Dartmouth College, " As a Strong Bird 
on Pinions Free." Published under the 
same title in a small volume with other 
poems (Washington, no publisher). 



xvi CHKONOLOGY 

1873 
January 22. Prostrated by paralysis at 
Washington. 

May 23. Death of his mother at Camden 
(New Jersey). 

Hemoved to Camden, thenceforth his 
home for the remainder of his life. 

1874-75 
Passed through a hard struggle with his 
sickness. 

1876 
Published sixth (centennial) edition of 
Leaves of Grass and a uniform volume, 
Two Rivulets, composed of prose and new 
poems (Camden, author's edition). 
Eeceived substantial returns from the 
sale of this edition in England, and many 
encouraging letters from the most im- 
portant English authors. 

1877-78 
Eecovered partially from his prostration 
by living much in the open air in the 
country. 



CHRONOLOGY xvii 

1879 
April 14. Delivered for the first time his 
address on Abraham Lincoln in the 
Metropolitan Opera House at New York. 
September. Made a long Western journey 
as far as the Rocky Mountains. 

1880 
April 15. Delivered lecture on Lincoln 
in Chestnut Street Opera House, Phila- 
delphia. 

June. Visited Dr. Richard Maurice 
Bucke at London, Ontario, and journeyed 
with him through Canada. 

1881 
October. Visited Boston to attend to the 
issuing of the seventh edition of Leaves 
of Grass (James R. Osgood & Co.). 
Visited Concord as the guest of Frank 
B. Sanborn, and was entertained at 
dinner by Emerson and his family. 

1882 
March. Prosecution of Osgood & Co. for 
publication of Leaves of Grass threatened 



xviii CHBONOLOGY 

by District Attorney Oliver Stevens. 
Whitman purchased plates and copies 
on Osgood's refusal to continue publica- 
tion. 

Published eighth edition of Leaves of 
Grass from same plates without altera- 
tion (Philadelphia, Bees, Welsh & 
Co., afterwards David McKay). 
Published Specimen Days and Collect (Phil- 
adelphia, same publishers). 

1883 
Eichard Maurice Bucke published Walt 
Whitman. 

1884-87 
Eemained in Camden in steadily declin- 
ing health. 

1887 
Attended a reception given in his honor 
by the Contemporary Club of Philadel- 
phia. 

1888 
November 2. Brought near to death by 
a fresh attack of paralysis. 



CHKONOLOGY xix 

1888 (continued) 
Published November Boughs (Philadel- 
phia, McKay). 

Published Complete Poems and Prose in 
one volume (personally issued and han- 
dled by Whitman). 

1889 
May 31. Appeared at a public dinner 
given by citizens of Camden in honor of 
his seventieth birthday. 
Published as a birthday souvenir the 
ninth edition of Z^wes of Grass, a limited 
pocket edition, including " Sands at 
Seventy" and "A Backward Glance 
o'er Travel' d Eoads." 

1890 
April 15. Bead his Lincoln Address at 
a reception given him by the Contempo- 
rary Club. 

May 31. Attended birthday dinner at 
Beisser's in Philadelphia, where he dis- 
cussed Immortality with Ingersoll. 



xx CHEONOLOGY 

1891 
May 31. Birthday dinner held at Whit- 
man' s home by a notable company. 
October 21. Attended Ingersoll' s lecture, 
Liberty in Literature, given for his bene- 
fit at Horticultural Hall, Philadelphia. 
Last appearance in public. 
December. Published Good- Bye my Fancy 
(Philadelphia, McKay) and immediately 
afterwards the tenth edition of Leaves of 
Grass (same publisher), the final proofs 
being passed by him while on his death- 
bed. 

1892 
January. Published Complete Prose 
Works, uniform with tenth edition of 
Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia, McKay). 
March 26. Walt Whitman died at 
Camden, New Jersey. 
March 30. Buried at Harleigh Cemetery, 
near Camden, addresses being made by 
Bobert G. Ingersoll, Daniel G. Brinton, 
Thomas B. Harned, and Bichard M. 
Bucke. 



CHEONOLOGY xxi 

1893. 
John Addington Symonds published 
Walt Whitman: A Study. 

1894 
May 31. The Walt Whitman Fellow- 
ship (International) organized at Phila- 
delphia. (This association has continu- 
ally since 1894 held annual meetings in 
Philadelphia, in Boston, or in New 
York on each anniversary of Whitman's 
birth.) 

1896 
John Burroughs published Whitman, a 
Study. 

1897 
Calamus (letters written by Walt Whit- 
man to Peter Doyle) published (Bos- 
ton, Laurens Maynard). 
The eleventh edition of Leaves of Grass, 
including " Old Age Echoes" (posthu- 
mous additions) published (Boston, Small, 
Maynard & Co.). 

1898 
The second edition of Complete Prose 



xxii CHBONOLOGY 

Works, uniform with eleventh edition 

of Leaves of Grass, published (Boston, 

same publishers). 

The Wound Dresser (Whitman's hospital 

letters in war time) published (Boston, 

same publishers). 

1902 
The Writings of Walt Whitman published 
in ten volumes as a limited subscription 
edition (New York and London, G. P. 
Putnam's Sons). 

1904 
Walt Whitman's Diary in Canada, edited 
by William Sloane Kennedy, and An 
American Primer, edited by Horace 
Traubel, published (both Boston, Small, 
Maynard & Co.). 



WALT WHITMAN 



WALT WHITMAN. 

I. Paumanok and Manhattan. 

Walt Whitman, a hosmos, of Manhattan 
the son. 

As I pass O Manhattan, your frequent and 
swift flash of eyes offering me love, 

Offering me response to my own — these 
repay me. 

Long Island, or to call it by its 
Indian name that Whitman so dearly 
loved, Panmanok, stretches from New 
York Bay eastward for about one 
hundred and thirty miles, its average 
breadth being about ten miles. It is, 
as Whitman describes it, fish-shaped, 
Brooklyn representing the head, while 
the eastern end divides into two penin- 
sulas to form the tail. The southern of 
these, stretching far out into the At- 
lantic, terminates in Montauk Point, a 
bold headland where Whitman pictures 
himself standing, "as on some mighty 
eagle's beak. 7 ' This promontory forms 



2 WALT WHITMAN 

the end of the island's backbone which 

begins with the " beautiful hills of 

Brooklyn." 

South of this range of hills the coun- 
try is nearly level and the soil sandy. 
Along the southern coast extends a 
series of broad, shallow lagoons, like the 
lagoon at Venice, the largest of them 
known as the Great South Bay. South 
of these bays, or lagoons, is a long nar- 
row strip of sand, or "Lido," caressed 
by Atlantic's breezes and pounded by 
his storm waves. The bays are a fa- 
mous resort for aquatic birds, and 
formerly the waters teemed with fish. 
The bay men, a rough, hardy race, 
occupied themselves with fishing, lob- 
ster-catching, oyster-raising, and clam- 
digging. The northern shore, border- 
ing on Long Island Sound, is a beautiful, 
gently rolling, well- wooded country, 
and in the early years of the nineteenth 
century was one of the most fertile and 
prosperous farming regions on the sea- 



WALT WHITMAN 3 

board. It is deeply indented by har- 
bors, and at the head of one of the finest 
of these stands the little town of Hunt- 
ington. Such was the environment into 
which Walt Whitman was born, and 
these were his frequent haunts for over 
forty years. 

The region about Huntington was 
settled early in the seventeenth century 
by two different streams of immigration, 
one coming from England, by way of 
Massachusetts and Connecticut, the other 
from Holland, by way of New Amster- 
dam. 

The Eev. Zachariah Whitman, born 
in England in 1595, came to this country 
in 1635, and established himself in Mil- 
ford, Connecticut. Some time before 
1660 his son Joseph crossed Long 
Island Sound to Huntington. Either 
he or one of his immediate descendants 
bought the farm at West Hills, three 
miles south of the village of Huntington, 
where Walt Whitman was born. At 



4 WALT WHITMAN 

about the time of the arrival of Joseph 
Wliitman there appears the first record 
of the family of Van Velsor, of Dutch 
extraction, at Cold Spring Harbor, a 
few miles west of Huntington. During 
the generations between 1660 and 1820 
each family was represented by substan- 
tial, prosperous, hard-working farmers, 
with occasionally a u captain " of one 
of the ships which constituted that old 
merchant marine, of which the country 
was so justly proud in the days before 
the government decided that commerce 
was a crime to be suppressed by tariff 
and navigation laws. 

Yet another branch of Whitman's an- 
cestry should be mentioned. His ma- 
ternal grandmother was Amy (Naomi) 
Williams, of a Quaker family, also long 
resident in the region. Thus Walt 
combined the elements of Pilgrim, of 
Dutch, and of Quaker descent. 

Walter Whitman, who was a carpenter 
and builder as well as a farmer, married 



WALT WHITMAN 5 

Louisa Van Yelsor in 1816, and of the 
nine children of the marriage Walt was 
the second. He was born on the ances- 
tral farm, May 31, 1819. 

The farm is beautifully situated among 
the hills which form the backbone of the 
island and there are spots upon or near 
it commanding views of both the ocean 
to the south and Long Island Sound to 
the north. The house, a moderate- 
sized, comfortable, old-fashioned farm- 
house, is still standing. 

When Walt was less than five years old, 
the family moved to Brooklyn, where, 
with frequent visits to his birthplace 
and other parts of Long Island, — prob- 
ably spending half his time there, — the 
lad grew to manhood. He attended the 
common schools of Brooklyn until he 
was thirteen, and then entered a print- 
ing-office to learn the trade. When he 
was about sixteen or seventeen, he taught 
school on Long Island. As a boy and 
young man, he was strong and active, 



6 WALT WHITMAN 

fond of sports, ball-playing and fishing 
being his favorites. He never went 
gunning. 

A former pupil, Charles A. Boe, of 
Lakewood, New Jersey, thus gives some 
of his memories of him as schoolmaster : — 

1 1 I went to school to him in the town 
of Flushing, Long Island. He taught 
the school at Little Bay Side. We be- 
came very much attached to him. 

"His ways of teaching were peculiar. 
He did not confine himself to books, as 
most of the teachers then did, but taught 
orally, — yes, had some original ideas, 
all his own. I know about that, for I 
had heard of others who tried oral teach- 
ing. But the plans he adopted were 
wholly of his own conception, and most 
successful. 

" He was not severe with the boys, but 
had complete discipline in the school. 
Before and after school, and at recess, he 
was a boy among boys, always free, al- 
ways easy, never stiff. He took active 



WALT WHITMAN 7 

part in games of frolic. It seemed his 
object to teach even when we played. 

1 1 Whitman never was trifling. I conld 
see that he always kept in mind the 
serious nature of his task and its respon- 
sibility. At the same time he would 
never betray by anything in his manner 
that he felt above us or wished in any 
way to put on a tone or an air of superi- 
ority. 

" Whitman was very foud of describ- 
ing objects and incidents to the school. 
He would not do this privately, but to 
all hands. He would give quite a good 
deal of time to any subject that seemed 
worth while. He was always interesting, 
a very good talker, able to command the 
attention of scholars, of whom, by the 
way, there were seventy or eighty. Our 
ages ranged sixteen, seventeen, eighteen 
years old ; yet many, too, were young 
shavers like myself. 

4 ' I never heard the least complaint of 
Walt from any scholar or from the par- 



8 WALT WHITMAN 

ents of any scholar. We were all deeply 
attached to him, and were sorry when 
he went away. 

"The girls did not seem to attract 
him. He did not specially go anywhere 
with them or show any extra fondness 
for their society. 

"His kindness, affability, his close 
association with us, were unusual 
and agreeable. Uniformly kind ? — yes, 
without the least variation; always ex- 
actly the same. 

"Walt was a good story-teller. Oh! 
excellent; was both funny and serious. 
Did I say he had his own notions how to 
punish a scholar? If he caught a boy 
lying, he exposed him before the whole 
school in a story. But the story was 
told without the mention of any names. 
No punishment beyond that. He had 
such a way of telling his story that the 
guilty fellow knew who was meant. He 
would do this in the case of any ordinary 
offence ; but, if the offence was grave 



WALT WHITMAN 9 

enough, the whole school was taken into 
the secret. 

" He was the soul of honor. If any 
one attempted anything dishonorable, he 
would be out on it at once. There was 
an examination or something. I had a 
paper with names on. I did not use it, 
but he saw the paper. After examina- 
tion was over, and the school was about 
to be dismissed, he said he was sorry any 
scholar should do such a thing as this he 
had seen me do. He did not mention 
my name, but I know I never committed 
the offence again. 

" My memory of Walt is acute, unusu- 
ally acute,- — probably because his per- 
sonality had such a peculiar and power- 
ful effect upon me, even as a boy. I had 
other teachers, but none of them ever left 
such an impress upon me. And yet I 
could not mention any particular thing. 
It was his whole air, his general sympa- 
thetic way, his eye, his voice, his entire 
geniality. I felt something I could not 



10 WALT WHITMAN 

describe. What I say, others will also 
say. I think he affected all as he did me. 
They have admitted it, yet, like me, 
can give no definite reasons. No one 
could tell why. Their memory of him 
is exactly like mine. There must be 
something in it ; it is not imagination. 

" Whitman had dignity, and yet at the 
same time he could descend to sociabil- 
ity. The very moment he stepped 
across that school door-sill he was mas- 
ter. He had authority, but was not 
severe. We obeyed and respected him. 

u One thing is sure. As far as Walt's 
goodness of character goes, you can re- 
port me pretty fully and as strongly as you 
choose. Even back in the school- days, 
those of us who knew him, his scholars 
there on Long Island, felt, somehow, 
without knowing why, that here was a 
man out of the average, who strangely 
attracted our respect and affection." 

It was about this time that he be- 
gan writing for newspapers and maga- 



WALT WHITMAN 11 

zines. In 1839 and 1840 he was at 
Huntington, editing The Long Islander, 
which he founded* 

In October, 1894, Dr. Brinton with 
Horace Traubel and the present writer 
made a pilgrimage to Huntington and 
West Hills ; and Dr. Brinton elicited this 
information regarding Whitman and his 
association with the place : — 

"Two of the forefathers of the hamlet 
clearly remembered his powerful per- 
sonality, brimful of life, revelling in 
strength, careless of time and the world, 
of money and of toil, a lover of books 
and of jokes, delighting to gather round 
him the youth of the village in his 
printing-room of evenings and tell them 
stories and read them poetry, his own 
and others' . That of his own he called 
his i yawp, ' a word which he afterward 
made famous. Both remembered him 
as a delightful companion, generous to a 
fault, glorying in youth, negligent of his 
affairs, issuing The Long Islander at ran- 



12 WALT WHITMAN 

dom intervals, — once a week, once in 
two weeks, once in three, — until its 
financial backers lost faith and hope 
and turned him out, and with him the 
whole office corps $ for Walt himself was 
editor, publisher, compositor, pressman, 
and printer's devil, all in one." 

During his whole life Whitman seemed 
to give people the impression of having 
nothing to do at the very time that he 
was actually doing great quantities of 
work, and at this period he seems to 
have been regarded as something of a 
" loafer/ 7 not at all in a bad sense of the 
word, but as implied in his own expres- 
sion, "I loaf and invite my soul." He 
was apparently quite indifferent to the 
attractions of women. One of our 
informants on this occasion, an old 
man who remembered him, said, "He 
seemed to hate women." This was un- 
doubtedly an overstatement, but it at 
least goes to show that he did not make 
himself conspicuous with them. This is 



WALT WHITMAN 13 

significant in view of certain erroneous 
deductions that have been made from 
the earlier parts of Leaves of Grass. 

About 1840 Whitman returned to 
Brooklyn. He was employed in print- 
ing-offices as a compositor, and after- 
ward he was in business with his father 
as a house-builder. In 1848 and 1849 he 
was editor of The Brooklyn Eagle; but 
the growing arrogance of the slave 
power drove him from the Democratic 
party, with which he had been affili- 
ated, and led to his severing his con- 
nection with the Eagle and to his writ- 
ing the spirited verses known as " Blood 
Money," in fierce denunciation of those 
who, he felt, had proved traitors to the 
cause of freedom. During this period 
he was a frequent contributor to The 
Democratic Bevietv and other periodicals. 
The contributions were short stories, 
rather forcibly told, and verses, clever 
and musical, but neither containing 
anything rising above the commonplace. 



14 WALT WHITMAN 

One of his productions about this 
time was Franklin Mucins, a temperance 
tract. In after-years the recollection of 
this work was rather an annoyance to 
Whitman ; and when, long after it was 
out of print, some of his friends insti- 
tuted a search for a copy as a curiosity, 
he said he hoped to heaven they would 
never find it. They never did during 
his lifetime, but three or four copies 
have since been discovered. 

Nothing seemed to delight him more 
than to mingle with and observe the 
crowds. His favorite perch was the seat 
with the driver on top of a Broadway 
omnibus, and the omnibus drivers were 
all his cronies. It is said that on one 
occasion when one of them, who had a 
family dependent upon him, became ill, 
Walt saved his place by driving for him 
for several months. This is apparently 
what gave rise to the story that he was 
in early life a " stage- driver.' 7 But the 
top of the omnibus was by no means his 



WALT WHITMAN 15 

only point of observation. He was a 
frequent attendant at the theatre and 
opera; and they seem, especially the 
latter, to have exercised a powerful 
formative influence upon his character. 
He was a constant frequenter of the 
old Park, the Bowery, Broadway, and 
Chatham Square Theatres and the Ital- 
ian operas at Chambers Street, Astor 
Place, and the Battery. His favorites 
among the actors were Fanny Kemble, 
the elder Booth, and Edwin Forrest, 
and, among the singers, pre-eminently 
the great contralto, Alboni, whom he 
heard every time she sang in New York, 
and to whom he addressed the lines, 
"To a Certain Cantatrice." Another 
of his delights was the seashore, and he 
would lie for a whole summer's day on 
his back in the sand and bask in the 
sunshine, or shout Homer or Shakespeare 
to the breakers, or wander on the beach 
by night. The sights and sounds of 
nature and the human turmoil of the city 



16 WALT WHITMAN 

seemed equally to appeal to him and 
equally to be assimilated. He was as 
the child who went forth every day : 
all these became part of him. He would 
often cross the East Biver, in the pilot- 
house of a ferry-boat, back and forth 
for half a day or well into the night ; 
and the pilots and deck-hands were as 
great friends as the omnibus drivers. 
He relates that he was sometimes in- 
trusted by the pilot with the wheel, until 
one day he narrowly escaped a collision, 
after which he desisted from this dan- 
gerous practice. Though not in the 
habit of attending church, he, even as 
a little boy, went a number of times to 
listen to Elias Hicks, as later he did to 
hear Father Taylor ; and he received a 
lifelong impression from each, as is in- 
dicated by his memoirs of them pub- 
lished in November Boughs, when Whit- 
man was sixty- nine years old. He 
never was known to have many books, 
but he would spend a good deal of time 



WALT WHITMAN 17 

reading in the libraries of New York 
and Brooklyn. 

Of the years from 1848 to 1855 he 
tells his own story: "In 1848, '49, I 
was occupied as editor of the ' daily 
Eagle ' newspaper, in Brooklyn. The 
latter year went off on a leisurely journey 
and working expedition (my brother Jeff 
with me) through all the middle States, 
and down the Ohio and Mississippi 
rivers. [In another place Whitman 
says the Southern trip was in ? 48.] 
Lived awhile in New Orleans, and 
worked on editorial staff of ' daily Cres- 
cent ' newspaper. After a time plodded 
back northward, up the Mississippi, and 
around to, and by way of the great 
lakes, Michigan, Huron, and Erie, to 
Niagara Falls and lower Canada, finally 
returning through central New York 
and down the Hudson ; traveling alto- 
gether probably 8,000 miles this trip, 
to and fro. '51, '53, occupied in house- 
building in Brooklyn. (For a little of 



18 WALT WHITMAN 

the first part of that time in printing 
a daily and weekly paper, 'the Free- 
man. 7 ) '55, lost my dear father this 
year by death. Commenced putting 
' Leaves of Grass 7 to press for good, at 
the job printing oftice of my friends, 
the brothers Eome, in Brooklyn, after 
many MS. doings and undoings — (I 
had great trouble in leaving out the 
stock 'poetical' touches, but succeeded 
at last.) I am now (1856-'7) passing 
through my 37th year." 

Some time previous to this latter 
date, probably about 1850, he seemed 
of a sudden to broaden and deepen 
immensely. He became less interested 
in what are usually regarded as the 
more practical affairs of life. He lost 
what little ambition he ever had for 
money- making, and permitted good 
business opportunities to pass unheeded. 
He ceased to write the somewhat inter- 
esting but altogether respectable and 
commonplace stories and verses which he 



WALT WHITMAN 19 

had been in the habit of contributing to 
periodicals. He would take long trips 
into the country, no one knew where, 
and would spend more time in his 
favorite haunts about the city or on the 
ferries or the tops of omnibuses, at the 
theatre and opera, in picture galleries, 
and wherever he could observe men and 
women and art and nature. Dr. Bucke 
believed this change to be the result of a 
sudden — almost instantaneous — illumi- 
nation, an experience of which he 
thought Whitman was conscious without 
fully understanding it, and that it is to 
this that he refers in the lines in the 
" Song of Myself" : — 

" I mind how once we lay such a trans- 
parent summer morning, 



Swiftly arose and spread around me 
the peace and knowledge that pass 
all the argument of the earth, 

And I know that the hand of God is 
the promise of my own, 

And I know that the spirit of God is 
the brother of my own, 



20 WALT WHITMAN 

And that all the men ever born are 
also my brothers, and the women 
my sisters and lovers, 

And that a kelson of the creation is 
love." 

Whitman has said in Specimen Days 
that Leaves of Grass was forming itself 
in his mind for about eight years prior 
to its publication in 1855. The first 
edition was issued from the press of 
Borne Brothers, June, 1855. It is a 
thin quarto of ninety- five pages, eight 
by eleven and a quarter inches. It con- 
tains twelve " poems," or rather the 
part of the book printed as verse is 
divided into twelve parts with no other 
headings than " Leaves of Grass." It 
also contains a remarkable preface, 
printed as prose, but no less poetic than 
the rest, in which he outlined his pur- 
pose and from which the following is an 
extract : — 

"The Americans of all nations at any 
time upon the earth, have probably 



WALT WHITMAN 2\ 

the fullest poetical nature. The United 
States themselves are essentially the 
greatest poem. In the history of the 
earth hitherto, the largest and most stir- 
ring appear tame and orderly to their 
ampler largeness and stir. Here at last 
is something in the doings of man that 
corresponds with the broadcast doings 
of the day and night. . . . Here is action 
untied from strings, necessarily blind 
to particulars and details, magnificently 
moving in vast masses. Here is the hos- 
pitality which for ever indicates heroes. 
. . . Here the performance disdaining 
the trivial unapproach'd in the tre- 
mendous audacity of its crowds and 
groupings and the push of its perspec- 
tive spreads with crampless and flowing 
breadth and showers its prolific and 
splendid extravagance. One sees it 
must indeed own the riches of summer 
and winter, and need never be bank- 
rupt while corn grows from the ground 
or the orchards drop apples or the bays 



22 WALT WHITMAN 

contain fish or men beget children upon 
women. 

" Other states indicate themselves in 
their deputies — but the genius of the 
United States is not best or most in its 
executives or legislatures, nor in its 
ambassadors or authors or colleges or 
churches or parlors, nor even in its 
newspapers or inventors — but always 
most in the common people. . . . The 
largeness of nature or the nation were 
monstrous without a corresponding large- 
ness and generosity of the spirit of the 
citizen. Not nature nor swarming states 
nor streets and steamships nor prosper- 
ous business nor farms nor capital nor 
learning may suffice for the ideal of 
man — nor suffice the poet. No remi- 
niscences may suffice either. A live 
nation can always cut a deep mark and 
can have the best authority the cheapest 
— namely from its own soul. This is 
the sum of the profitable uses of indi- 
viduals or states and of present action 



WALT WHITMAN 23 

and grandeur and of the subjects of 
poets. — As if it were necessary to trot 
back generation after generation to the 
eastern records ! As if the beauty and 
sacredness of the demonstrable must fall 
behind that of the mythical ! As if 
men do not make their mark out of any 
times ! As if the opening of the western 
continent by discovery and what has 
transpired in North and South America 
were less than the small theatre of the 
antique or the aimless sleepwalking of 
the middle ages ! The pride of the 
United States leaves the wealth and 
finesse of the cities and all returns of 
commerce and agriculture and all the 
magnitude of geography or shows of 
exterior victory to enjoy the breed of 
fullsized men, or one fullsized man un- 
conquerable and simple. 

" The American poets are to enclose 
old and new for America is the race of 
races . . . For such the expression of the 
American poet is to be transcendent and 



24 WALT WHITMAN 

new. It is to be indirect and not direct 
or descriptive or epic. Its quality goes 
through these to much more. Let the 
age and the wars of other nations be 
chanted and their eras and characters 
be illustrated and that finish the verse. 
Not so the great psalm of the republic. 
Here the theme is creative and has 
vista. . . . Whatever stagnates in the 
fiat of custom or obedience or legislation 
he [the great poet] never stagnates. 
Obedience does not master him, he mas- 
ters it. High up out of reach he stands 
turning a concentrated light — he turns 
the pivot with his finger — he baffles the 
swiftest runners as he stands and easily 
overtakes and envelopes them. The 
time straying toward infidelity and con- 
fections and persiflage he withholds by 
his steady faith. . . . Faith is the anti- 
septic of the soul — it pervades the com- 
mon people and preserves them — they 
never give up believing and expecting 
and trusting. There is that indescrib- 



WALT WHITMAN 25 

able freshness and unconsciousness about 
an illiterate person that humbles and 
mocks the power of the noblest expres- 
sive genius. The poet sees for a certainty 
how one not a great artist may be just 
as sacred and perfect as the greatest 
artist. " 

In subsequent editions this preface is 
omitted, but the greater part of it is 
reprinted as verse and distributed among 
the new " poems" added; and in 1882 
Whitman included it in a revised form 
in his first collected prose volume, Speci- 
men Days and Collect. No author's name 
appeared on the title-page of this first 
edition, nor did the name of any pub- 
lisher. It read simply 1 1 Leaves of Grass. 
Brooklyn, New York: 1855." Opposite 
the title-page, however, appeared the 
now well-known portrait of Whitman 
clad in shirt and trousers with a slouch 
hat, his left hand in the trousers pocket 
and his right resting on his hip. This 
portrait seemed really to appear to some 



26 WALT WHITMAN 

of the British critics " tougher " than 
the book itself. Of course, it was not 
"tough" at all, but represented a man 
with a face of great refinement, in neg- 
ligee costume, standing in an easy, non- 
chalant attitude. Nevertheless, it did 
suggest something of a pose ; and per- 
haps at that period of his career Whit- 
man did pose to some extent. A thou- 
sand copies of the book were printed. 
A few were sent to newspapers for re- 
view, a few sent as presentation copies, 
and the rest placed with book -sellers 
for sale. The newspapers, as a rule, 
ignored the book. A few abused it 
with a violence of language which now 
seems ludicrous. Whitman himself wrote 
three anonymous reviews of it, in one of 
which he declared that "very devilish 
to some and very divine to others will 
appear these new poems. ' ? This review, 
which was reprinted in the second 
edition and also in Dr. Buckets Walt 
Whitman, should be read in its entirety 



WALT WHITMAN 27 

as showing the poet's own idea of his 
work in setting out. All three appear 
in In Be Walt Whitman. Emerson was 
one of those to whom Whitman sent 
copies. Although his letter of acknowl- 
edgment is well known, it is too impor- 
tant to be omitted here :— 

" Concord, Masstts, 21 July, 1855. 
11 Bear Sir •, — I am not blind to the 
worth of the wonderful gift of 'Leaves 
of Grass. J I find it the most extraordi- 
nary piece of wit and wisdom that 
America has yet contributed. I am 
very happy in reading it, as great 
power makes us happy. It meets the 
demand I am always making of what 
seems the sterile and stingy Nature, as 
if too much handiwork or too much 
lymph in the temperament were making 
our western wits fat and mean. I give 
you joy of your free and brave thought. 
I have great joy in it. I find incom- 
parable things said incomparably well, 



28 WALT WHITMAN 

as they must be. I find the courage of 
treatment which so delights us, and 
which large perception only can inspire. 

"I greet you at the beginning of a 
great career, which yet must have had a 
long foreground somewhere for such a 
start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see 
if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the 
solid sense of the book is a sober cer- 
tainty. It has the best merits, namely, 
of fortifying and encouraging. 

"I did not know until I, last night, 
saw the book advertised in a newspaper, 
that I could trust the name as real and 
available for a post-office. I wish to see 
my benefactor, and have felt much like 
striking my tasks and visiting New 
York to pay you my respects. 

"R. W. Emerson. 
"Mb. Walter Whitman." 

It is not to be wondered at that the 
young poet should have been elated at 
the receipt of such a letter from such a 



WALT WHITMAN 29 

man, and, if his treatment of the matter 
was not the very wisest imaginable, it 
is easy, after the half- century that has 
elapsed, to pass it by with a smile ; but 
at that time he was accused of betraying 
a confidence in publishing the letter. 
Eemoved from the heat of controversy, 
this appears like rank nonsense. A 
letter to an entire stranger in regard to 
a matter of public interest is not usually 
regarded as a private letter. If Emerson 
did not mean what he said, it is hard to 
see why he said it ; and, if he did mean 
it, it is equally hard to see why he or any 
one else should object to its being made 
public. Before Whitman allowed the 
letter to be printed, he showed it to 
Charles A. Dana, who was a friend of 
Emerson as well as of Whitman; and he 
not only advised, but urged the latter to 
publish it. It really would have re- 
quired a good deal of self-denial not to 
have done so; and it is not easy to see 
why the self-denial was called for, or, 



30 WALT WHITMAN 

waiving the question of good taste on 
Whitman's part, how Emerson was in- 
jured. After much hesitation he did 
publish it along with some press notices 
in an appendix to the second edition of 
Leaves of Grass, which appeared the 
following year; and not only that, but 
he had stamped on the back of the book 
in gilt letters the words: "I greet you 
at the beginning of a great career. 
E. W. Emerson." It was represented 
by Whitman's opponents that Emerson 
was greatly incensed at this, but there is 
no evidence that he was ; and, in fact, 
there is the best of evidence that he was 
not, in that he fulfilled his implied 
promise to visit Whitman in New York, 
that he visited him repeatedly, and that 
friendly relations were established be- 
tween the two men, manifested by their 
correspondence and their occasional 
meetings, which continued without in- 
terruption until the time of Emerson's 
death. There was nothing in the facts 



WALT WHITMAN 31 

to warrant the foot-note reference to the 
incident in Dr. Edward Emerson's Em- 
erson in Concord. Dr. Emerson was 
either misled or expressed merely his 
own idea. Horace Traubel has letters 
in his possession of a much later date 
(including one from Emerson himself 
written in 1863) showing that Emerson 
had not substantially changed his opin- 
ion. In spite of all this, however, and 
of continued manifestations of friendli- 
ness, he did say on more than one oc- 
casion, years after, that Whitman had 
not treated him well in the matter 
of letters. He never disowned or with- 
drew what he had said, but he made it 
clear that he felt that somehow he had 
been abused. The subject involves a 
matter of casuistry which may be left to 
the judgment and taste of the reader. 
It is generally understood that Em- 
erson's family and his immediate friends 
were bitterly opposed to Whitman or 
to any recognition of him, and this may 



32 WALT WHITMAN 

have prevented Emerson from following 
up the matter more warmly j but, be 
that as it may, he never retracted any- 
thing he said in the letter. In 1856, 
after the publication of the second edi- 
tion, Emerson sent a copy of the book 
to Carlyle with a letter describing it 
as having " terrible eyes and buffalo 
strength.' 7 

Whitman replied to Emerson's letter 
in a long epistle which he published 
with the original letter in the appendix 
to the second edition. In it he ad- 
dressed Emerson as " Master," and said 
rather more than was altogether tact- 
ful or necessary. It is quite believable 
that Emerson's fastidious taste suffered 
something of a shock at all this, but it is 
not at all believable that he took the 
matter very seriously or changed his 
mind in regard to the value of Whit- 
man's work. Whitman himself in later 
years referred to the time when he 
hailed Emerson as u Master," and, while 



WALT WHITMAN 33 

making it quite clear that at the later 
period he would not have expressed 
himself in the same way, he yet declared 
that he was not sorry for the burst of 
enthusiasm that led to it. It was one of 
those acts which under the influence of 
enthusiasm every one sometimes does, 
and feels sheepish about afterward. It 
was rather naive, and to be naive is not 
considered quite dignified in this sophis- 
ticated age. The matter was really of 
very little consequence and hardly 
worth referring to, were it not that so 
much has been made of it. 

The second edition, 1856, is a little, 
thick 16mo, containing nearly twice as 
much matter as the first edition. The 
title-page was still without author's or 
publisher's name, and the "rowdy " por- 
trait was retained. Containing Emer- 
son's letter in the appendix, it forced 
itself more upon the attention of the 
critics than did the first edition. They, 
however, for the most part greeted it 



34 WALT WHITMAN 

with howls of derision and torrents of 
abuse. Emerson's letter puzzled them. 
They thought he must have been suffer- 
ing from an attack of temporary in- 
sanity. 

A month or so after the appearance of 
the first edition of the book Moncure 
Conway called on Whitman several 
times, went to the seashore and 
sauntered about the streets of New 
York with him. He afterward became 
a firm friend, although he somewhat 
annoyed Whitman by publishing in the 
Fortnightly Review in 1866 a rather 
bizarre account of their early inter- 
views. It is not likely that he intended 
to misrepresent Whitman, but only — as 
he explained later — to make him pict- 
uresque to the English public. 

Late in 1856 Thoreau came to see 
Whitman, presumably at Emerson's sug- 
gestion. He afterward wrote to his 
friend H. G. O. Blake in regard to his 
interview, and the letter is still extant, — 



WALT WHITMAX 35 

a very curious letter. Thoreau was 
evidently greatly puzzled. He writes : 
"I have just read his second edition 
(which he gave me) and it has done me 
more good than any reading for a long 
time. ... On the whole, it sounds to me 
very brave and very American, after 
whatever deductions. I do not believe 
that all the sermons, so called, that have 
been preached in this land put together 
are equal to it for preaching. We ought 
to rejoice greatly in him. He occasion- 
ally suggests something a little more 
than human. 77 

Nevertheless, the critics continued to 
bellow and howl with rage. Whitman 
would defy all canons of literary tradi- 
tion and all rules of decency. Whitman 
seemed not in the least disturbed. He 
stooped down and wrote in the ground 
as though he heard them not. Among 
the additions in the second edition was 
"A Woman Waits for Me, 77 — a direct 
defiance. 



36 WALT WHITMAN 

About the time of the issuing of the 
first edition Whitman gave up his busi- 
ness of house-building. He is reported 
to have said that he was afraid of get- 
ting rich. After the book appeared, he 
went down to the eastern end of Long 
Island, where he spent the late summer 
and all the autumn, about Shelter Island 
and Peconie Bay, absorbing and writing 
out new material. Then, as he told Dr. 
Bucke, he went back to New York with 
the confirmed resolution, from which he 
never afterward wavered, to go on with 
his poetic enterprise in his own way, 
and finish it as well as he could. 

Bryant and Whitman were on friendly 
terms at this time, and were in the 
habit of taking long walks together ; but 
there does not seem to be any expression 
on Bryant's part in regard to Whitman's 
poetry. It is not likely that he cared 
for it. 

About the only literary championship 
Whitman received during these years 



WALT WHITMAN 37 

immediately preceding the war was 
from the Saturday Press. This was a 
periodical whose purpose seemed to be 
to protest, apparently without any very 
distinct idea of what it was to protest 
against. Eespectability and Boston were 
its principal objects of opposition. It 
was the organ of New York Bohemia, or 
what called itself and tried to be Bohe- 
mia ; but Bohemianism was an exotic in 
New York at that time, and did not 
thrive in the alien soil. Nevertheless, 
it formed for a little while a meeting 
ground for a number of young writers, 
some of whom were destined to achieve 
fame. They were in the habit of resort- 
ing in the evening to Pfaff's, a German 
cafe" or EatlisJceUar in Broadway near 
Bleeker Street. Whitman often formed 
one of the group, and appears to have 
been very popular with all who met 
him there. Henry Clapp, Thomas 
Bailey Aldrich, William Winter, Ned 
Wilkins, Charles F. Browne (Artemus 



38 WALT WHITMAN 

Ward), Fitz James O'Brien, Fitzhugh 
Ludlow, and Edmund Clarence Stedman 
were of the set. Ada Clare was the rec- 
ognized queen of this little Bohemia. 
Ho wells in his Literary Friends and Ac- 
quaintance speaks of meeting Whitman 
at Pfaff's one evening in August, 1860. 
Howells was very much impressed by 
Whitman' s hearty greeting. i 1 1 remem- 
ber, ' ' he says, ' ' how he leaned back in 
his chair and reached out his great hand 
to me as if he were going to give it to 
me for good and all." The impression 
that Whitman's personality made upon 
Howells seems to have been very 
strong. He says, " The spiritual purity 
which I felt in him no less than the dig- 
nity is something that I will no more try 
to reconcile with what denies it in his 
page, but such things we may well 
leave to the adjustment of finer balances 
than we have at hand. I will make 
sure only of the greatest benignity in 
the presence of the man. The apostle 



WALT WHITMAN 39 

of the rough, the uncouth, was the 
gentlest person ; his barbaric yawp, 
translated into the terms of social en- 
counter, was an address of singular 
quiet, delivered in a voice of winning 
and endearing friendliness. " This ut- 
terance of Howells may be taken as an 
indication of Whitman's character to 
which all who came in contact with him 
in his early manhood and middle age 
bear testimony. 

Vigorous, never especially witty or vi- 
vacious, but always entering into the 
humor of the occasion, rather slow of 
speech and seeming to weigh his words, 
devotedly attached to his friends, frank, 
spontaneous, hearty, sincere, with a high 
degree of manly reserve and yet genial 
and affectionate, calm in his demeanor, 
yet occasionally under extreme pressure 
giving vent to vehement indignation, he 
drew all with whom he came into per- 
sonal contact to him in bonds of the 
highest esteem and warmest affection. 



40 WALT WHITMAN 

Cleanliness and purity seemed always to 
radiate from his person. 

It was some time in 1861 that Whit- 
man's association with PfafPs terminated 
rather unpleasantly. In the course of a 
political discussion at the time of the 
breaking out of the war a young South- 
ern sympathizer proposed the toast, 
" Success to Southern arms." Whit- 
man made an indignant reply and 
walked out of the place ; and, as he soon 
after left for the seat of war, he never 
went there again. But twenty years 
later, when Whitman was in New York, 
he found Pfaff in Twenty-fourth Street, 
and with his old host drank a toast to the 
memory of the old times and departed 
friends ; and the first to be remembered 
was poor Ada Clare, who some time in 
the intervening years had died in the 
horrors of hydrophobia. This reminis- 
cent visit he records in Specimen Bays. 

In 1857-58-59 Leaves of Grass was 
out of print. In 1860 a third edition 



WALT WHITMAN 41 

appeared, published by Thayer & Eld- 
ridge of Boston, a 12mo volume of 456 
pages, very beautifully printed on fine 
heavy paper. The matter was about 
double that of the second edition, the 
additions including most of the " Cal- 
amus" poems, which were for the first 
time grouped under that heading, and 
the lines entitled "To a Common Pros- 
titute. " Not a word of the matter 
which had given offence in the former 
editions was omitted. While the book 
was passing through the press, Whitman 
being in Boston correcting the proofs, 
Emerson called on him, and said: < [ When 
people in Boston want to talk, they go to 
the Common. Let us go there." The 
talk is thus related by Whitman himself : 
"Up and down this breadth by Beacon 
Street, between these same old elms, I 
walk' d for two hours, of a bright sharp 
February mid-day twenty-one years ago, 
with Emerson, then in his prime, keen, 
physically and morally magnetic, arm'd 



42 WALT WHITMAN 

at every point, and when he chose, 
wielding the emotional jnst as well as the 
intellectual. During these two hours he 
was the talker, and I the listener. It was 
an argument-statement, reconnoitring, 
review, attack, and pressing home, (like 
an army corps in order, artillery, cav- 
alry, infantry, ) of all that could be said 
against that part (and a main part) in 
the construction of my poems, ' Children 
of Adam. ' More precious than gold to 
me that dissertation. It afforded me, 
ever after, this strange and paradoxical 
lesson ,• each point of E.'s statement was 
unanswerable, no judge's charge ever 
more complete or convincing, I could 
never hear the points better put — and 
then I felt down in my soul the clear 
and unmistakable conviction to disobey 
all, and pursue my own way. 'What 
have you to say then to such things ?' 
said E., pausing in conclusion. 'Only 
that while I can' t answer them at all, I 
feel more settled than ever to adhere to 



WALT WHITMAN 43 

my own theory, and exemplify it,' was 
my candid response. Whereupon we 
went and had a good dinner at the 
American House." 

Emerson's position seems an anoma- 
lous one in view of his own utterance : 
u Heroism feels and never reasons, and 

therefore is always right Heroism 

works in contradiction to the voice of 
mankind, and in contradiction, for a 
time, to the voice of the great and 
good. Heroism is an obedience to a 
secret impulse of an individual char- 
acter." Emerson could never quite get 
away from his Puritan heredity, but it 
is not likely that Whitman fell in his 
esteem by reason of his firmness. There 
seems, however, to be some authority 
for the belief that Emerson's objections 
against the " Children of Adam " poems 
were not so much that he misunder- 
stood or disapproved of their substance 
as because he foresaw the bitter attacks 
to which they would render the book 



44 WALT WHITMAN 

liable and felt that these would defer, 
or even defeat, the acceptance of its 
wholesome lessons of democracy. 

There was less outcry about the book 
than there had been about the first and 
second editions. It started with a fair 
sale ; but the outbreak of the Civil War 
caused the failure of the publishers, and 
in the turmoil of war the book was for- 
gotten. 

Whitman's brother George had en- 
listed at the outbreak of the war and 
was wounded at the first battle of Fred- 
ericksburg, upon news of which Walt 
hastened to the front to his relief. Ex- 
cept for brief visits he never returned 
to New York. 



II. War-time and Washington. 

Around and angry, Fd thought to beat the 
alarum, and urge relentless war, 

But soon my fingers faiVd me> my face 
drooped and I resigned myself, 

To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or 
silently watch the dead. 

George Whitman, Walt's younger 
brother, was a brave and skilful officer. 
He went to the war as a lieutenant in 
the 51st New York Begiment, was in 
nearly all the great battles in Virginia, 
spent four or five months in Southern 
prisons, and was promoted by successive 
stages to the rank of lieutenant- colonel. 
Walt gives a brief sketch of his career 
in Specimen Bays. Captain Whitman's 
wound, which called Walt to the front, 
proved to be trifling, and in a short 
time he was able to rejoin his regiment ; 
but Walt's interest in the sick and 
wounded soldiers was by this time so 
much enlisted that he determined to 
stay, and devote his full powers to the 



46 WALT WHITMAN 

relief of their sufferings. He remained 
in the neighborhood of Fredericksburg 
about a month, ministering to the 
wounded, and then accompanied a party 
of them to Washington, where he re- 
mained, as a u voluntary missionary," 
as he phrases it, devoting himself to the 
relief of the victims of battle and dis- 
ease. 

During those years in hospital, camp, 
and field he attended, according to his 
own estimate, from eighty to a hundred 
thousand sick and wounded, sustaining 
body and spirit in the time of need. 
His visits to them varied from an hour 
or two to all day or all night, for with 
critical cases he generally watched 
throughout the night. Sometimes he 
took up his quarters in the hospital, and 
slept there or watched with the sick 
and wounded soldiers several nights in 
succession. He declared these years to 
be the greatest privilege and satisfaction 
and to contain the most profound lesson 



WALT WHITMAN 47 

of his life. In his ministrations he 
comprehended all who came in his way, 
Northern or Southern, and slighted 
none. The experience aroused and 
brought out and decided in him un- 
dreamed of depths of emotion. He de- 
clared that it gave him the most fervent 
views of the true ensemble and extent of 
the States. He partook of all the fluc- 
tuations, gloom, despair, hopes again 
aroused, courage evoked, of that ter- 
rible period. Without this, he declared, 
Leaves of Grass would not be existing. 
It certainly would not in the form we 
have it to-day. It might have been 
great, but it would have been different, 
and it would not have had its fullest 
justification. 

There seems to be no doubt that Whit- 
man's mere personal presence was in- 
strumental in saving thousands of lives. 
He brought the sick soldiers dainties, 
stationery, books, tobacco, — though, by 
the way, he never used tobacco himself, — 



48 WALT WHITMAN 

and whatever little comforts they re- 
quired, so far as he could supply them ; 
read to them and cheered them by the 
mere magnetism of his presence, bring- 
ing them hope, courage, and strength. 
Whatever the explanation, there can be 
no doubt of the fact. It is testified to by 
all the physicians and nurses who came 
in contact with him. 

" I am he bringing help for the sick 
as they pant on their backs," he had 
written before 1855 ; and in these days 
of gloom he justified the saying more lit- 
erally than it is probable that he ex- 
pected ever to find an opportunity of 
doing when the line was written. 

His memorandum of the case of one 
New York soldier gives so touching a 
picture of the fulness of his sympathy 
and the comfort which his ministra- 
tions brought to the sick and dying that 
it may well be quoted here : — 

"This afternoon, July 22d, I have 
spent a long time with Oscar F. Wilber, 



WALT WHITMAN 49 

Company G, 154th New York, low with 
chronic diarrhoea and a bad wound also. 
He asked me to read him a chapter in 
the New Testament. I complied, and 
ask' d him what I should read. He said, 
1 Make your own choice. ' I open' d at 
the close of one of the first books of the 
evangelists, and read the chapters de- 
scribing the latter hours of Christ, and 
the scenes at the crucifixion. The poor, 
wasted young man ask' d me to read the 
following chapter also, how Christ rose 
again. I read very slowly, for Oscar 
was feeble. It pleased him very much, 
yet the tears were in his eyes. He ask'd 
me if I enjoy'd religion. I said * Per- 
haps not, my dear, in the way you mean, 
and yet, may-be, it is the same thing.' 
He said, 'It is my chief reliance.' He 
talked of death, and said he did not fear 
it. I said 'Why, Oscar, don't you 
think you will get well ! ' He said ' I 
may, but it is not probable.' He spoke 
calmly of his condition. The wound was 



50 WALT WHITMAN 

very bad, it discharged much. Then 
the diarrhoea had prostrated him, and 
I felt he was even then the same as 
dying. He behaved very manly and 
affectionate. The kiss I gave him as I 
was about leaving he return' d fourfold. 
He gave me his mother's address, Mrs. 
Sally D. Wilber, Alleghany post-office, 
Cattaraugus County, N. Y. I had several 
such interviews with him. He died a 
few days after the one just described." 

Whitman's services had no connection 
with any of the organizations for the 
soldiers' relief. His work was entirely 
independent, voluntary, and gratuitous, 
the necessary funds being furnished by 
friends, mostly in Boston and New York. 
James Eedpath interested Emerson and 
others, who gladly responded to the call. 
Whitman's personal expenses, which 
were very small, — he lived in what was 
hardly more than a garret, — he met by 
writing for the newspapers. 

It was during this period that he be- 



WALT WHITMAN 51 

came intimate with William Douglas 
O'Connor, who became from that time 
so fast a friend and so doughty a cham- 
pion. The friendship of John Burroughs 
also dates from this time, and both of 
these and many others have borne fre- 
quent and eloquent witness to Whitman's 
devotion and loyalty during these years 
of service as well as to the wonderful 
bracing and invigorating influence of his 
personality. 

The immediate literary fruit of the 
war experiences was the collection of 
poems called Drum Taps. Under date 
of March 2, 1864, he writes to his 
mother : "KI can get a chance I think 
I shall come home for a while. I want 
to try to bring out a book of poems, a 
new one to be called 'Drum Taps,' and 
I want to come to New York for that 
purpose." 

The book appeared early in 1865. 
The title-page bore no publisher's name. 
It read simply "Walt Whitman's Drum 



52 WALT WHITMAN 

Taps, New York, 1865. " After the 
book was printed and some copies had 
been sold, Whitman wrote "Memories of 
President Lincoln/' including the now 
famous burial-hymn, " When Lilacs Last 
in the Door Yard Bloomed" ; and this, 
with a few other poems, was printed as 
an insert of twenty-four pages, entitled 
Sequel to Brum Taps, which was bound 
up with the remaining copies as an ap- 
pendix. 

It does not appear that Lincoln and 
Whitman ever met in conversation, 
though they frequently passed in the 
street and exchanged greetings. Whit- 
man's admiration for Lincoln was un- 
bounded 5 and Lincoln's exclamation 
when he saw Whitman pass the White 
House is well known : u Well, he looks 
like a man!" For a while Whitman 
lived where he could see Lincoln daily as 
the latter passed to and from the Soldiers' 
Home where he spent the nights during 
the warm weather. He usually rode, but 



WALT WHITMAN 53 

occasionally came and went in an open 
carriage, and was always escorted by a 
guard of cavalry with drawn sabres. 
Whitman could often see him plainly, 
and noted bis dark brown face, with 
deep -cut lines, the eyes with a latent 
sadness in their expression. Once, as 
he passed quite near and bowed and 
smiled, Whitman noticed this expression 
very distinctly. He felt that no por- 
trait of the President had caught the 
deep though subtle expression of his 
face, and thought that one of the great 
portrait painters of centuries ago was 
needed. 

In 1864 Whitman obtained a clerk- 
ship in the Department of the Interior, 
which, however, he did not retain long. 
He was engaged at this time in revising 
Leaves of Grass, and kept in his desk a 
copy of the 1860 Thayer & Eldridge 
edition, in which from time to time he 
jotted down notes. One day after office 
hours James Harlan, the Secretary of 



54 WALT WHITMAN 

the Interior, had the volume abstracted 
from Whitman's desk and brought to his 
own room for his examination. Whit- 
man was immediately discharged. Mr. 
Ashton, a friend of Whitman, called 
upon the secretary for an explanation. 
Mr. Harlan said that Whitman was dis- 
missed because he was a ' l free lover and 
the author of an immoral book," and 
declared that he would not reinstate 
him if the President himself should de- 
mand it $ he would resign in preference. 
This was the occasion of O'Connor's 
famous defence of Whitman, called The 
Good Gray Poet. It was an analysis of 
the sex problem in classic literature as 
far as the question of immorality is con- 
cerned. It is a most eloquent plea for 
liberty in literature, scathing in its de- 
nunciation, withering in the righteous 
lightning of its wrath. As an appeal 
for liberty in letters, it was applauded 
by literary men throughout the coun- 
try, regardless of their views about 



WALT WHITMAN 55 

Whitman. To say that Harlan quailed 
would be an understatement. His at- 
titude would have evoked pity from 
his bitterest enemy. Lacking the cour- 
age to defend his position by direct 
falsehood, he put the job off on an assist- 
ant, a creature named Lanman. This 
person fulfilled his commission by charg- 
ing Whitman, in innuendo only, with 
drunkenness and incompetence. The 
latter charge gave the lie to Harlan, 
though it was probably not so intended. 
O' Connor replied by a challenge to Lan- 
man to put his charges into the form of 
direct statements. Lanman made no re- 
sponse, and there the matter dropped. 

What notice Whitman took of the 
tempest is not recorded. He certainly 
took none publicly. He was almost im- 
mediately given an equally good posi- 
tion in the office of the Attorney-Gen- 
eral. 

In Washington, Whitman's lifelong 
habit of intimate association with 



56 WALT WHITMAN 

u powerful uneducated persons" (which 
in the New York days had enabled him 
to find comrades among the omnibus 
drivers and ferry-boat pilots) led him 
into friendly relations with many of the 
drivers and conductors of the street- 
cars. His intimacy with one of these 
men was so typical an example of the 
comradeship which is celebrated in the 
section of Leaves of Grass entitled " Cal- 
amus ' ' that it deserves special mention. 
Peter Doyle was born in Ireland in 
1847, and came to this country in in- 
fancy with his father, a blacksmith, who 
settled in Biehmond, Ya. Entering the 
Confederate army as a mere boy, he 
served throughout the war until he was 
paroled in Washington, where he ob- 
tained work as a street- car conductor. 
In this position, soon after the war, he 
met Whitman, who was a passenger on 
his car. In his own account of the 
meeting Doyle says: " We felt to each 
other at once. ... He did not get out 



WALT WHITMAN 57 

at the end of the trip, — in fact, went 
all the way back with me. . . . From 
that time on we were the biggest sort 
of friends. . . . Walt rode with me often 
at noon, always at night. ... It was 
our practice to go to a hotel on Wash- 
ington Avenue after I was done with 
my car. Like as not I would go to 
sleep, — lay my head on my hands on 
the table. Walt would stay there, wait, 
watch, keep me undisturbed, would 
wake me up when the hour of closing 
came. ... In the afternoon I would go 
up to the Treasury Building, and wait 
for him to get through if he was busy. 
Then we'd stroll out together, often 
without any plan/ going wherever we 
happened to get. This occurred days 
in and out, months running." 

This close companionship lasted until 
1872, when Doyle entered the service 
of the Pennsylvania Eailroad, by which 
he is still employed as a baggage-master. 
His friendship with Whitman continued 



58 WALT WHITMAN 

until the latter' s death, and many and 
frequent letters passed between them. 
Whitman's letters were published in 
1897, with an introduction by Dr. 
Bucke, containing an interesting inter- 
view with Peter Doyle. John Adding- 
ton Symonds, who read the letters in 
manuscript, said of them : u They throw 
a flood of light upon i Calamus,' and are 
superior to any commentary. [They] 
breathe a purity and simplicity of affec- 
tion, a naivete and reasonableness, which 
are very remarkable. . . . Throughout 
them Whitman shows the tenderest and 
wisest care for his young friend's wel- 
fare, helps him in material ways, and 
bestows upon him the best advice, the 
heartiest encouragement, without be- 
traying any sign of patronage or preach- 
ing." 

Democratic Vistas appeared as a pam- 
phlet in 1871. It is a plea for a char- 
acteristic American democratic litera- 
ture and a prophecy that such is to come. 



WALT WHITMAN 59 

Accepting the past with its inonarchism 
and feudalism as that out of which our 
civilization has grown, it claims Ameri- 
can democracy to be a training school 
for democracy in its highest form. It 
deprecates the restricted academic cult- 
ure of the day, not absolutely, but as not 
realizing its pretensions, and pleads for 
the higher and wider culture based upon 
the principles of the u Divine average" 
and personalism. " For to democracy, " 
he says, "the leveler, the unyielding 
principle of the average, is surely join'd 
another principle, equally unyielding, 
closely tracking the first, indispensable 
to it, opposite, (as the sexes are oppo- 
site,) and whose existence, confronting 
and ever- modifying the other, often 
clashing, paradoxical, yet neither of 
highest avail without the other, plainly 
supplies to these grand cosmic politics 
of ours, and to the launch' d-forth mor- 
tal dangers of republicanism, to-day or 
any day, the counterpart and offset 



60 WALT WHITMAN 

whereby Nature restrains the deadly 
original relentlessness of all her first-class 
laws. This second principle is individu- 
ality, the pride and centripetal isola- 
tion of a human being in himself — 
identity — personalism. Whatever the 
name, its acceptance and thorough infu- 
sion through the organizations of political 
commonalty now shooting Aurora-like 
about the world, are of utmost impor- 
tance, as the principle itself is needed for 
very life's sake. It forms, in a sort, or 
is to form, the compensating balance- 
wheel of the successful working machin- 
ery of aggregate America. " 

This book has been widely read, and 
has produced a profound influence upon 
working people as well as upon others 
both at home and abroad. As usual, 
Whitman proceeds by indirect and 
spiritual methods rather than by those 
direct and material. It is probably the 
most important of his prose works, 
though for fire and eloquence of diction 



WALT WHITMAN 61 

it does not reach the height of the pref- 
ace of the first edition of Leaves of 
Grass. 

During the summer of 1864 Whit- 
man's health began to give way. He 
experienced great lassitude and occa- 
sional attacks of faintness. Through an 
abrasion in his hand he became infected 
with septic poisoning from a gangrenous 
wound which he was assisting to dress. 
His arm to the shoulder became intensely 
inflamed. From this local affection he 
recovered with reasonable promptness, 
but his hitherto perfect health was 
ruined. He continued at his desk in 
Washington, pursuing his literary la- 
bors until 1873, when, on the night of 
the 22d of January, he had a paralytic 
stroke, — left-sided hemiplegia. From 
this he never fully recovered, entering 
thus upon a period of invalidism lasting 
nineteen years, until his death. 

The simplicity of Whitman's tastes 
and habits is shown in a letter written to 



62 WALT WHITMAN 

his mother a few days after this attack 
and while still confined to bed: — 

"Mrs. Ash ton has sent for me to be 
brought to her house to be taken care 
of — of course I do not accept her offer — 
they live iu grand style and I should be 
more bothered than benefitted by their 
refinements and luxuries, servants, etc. 

"Mother, I want you to know truly, 
that I do not want for anything — as to 
all the little extra fixings and superfluities, 
I never did care for them in health and 
they only annoy me in sickness — I have 
a good bed — a fire — as much grub as I 
wish and whatever I wish — and two or 
three good friends here, so I want you 
to not feel at all uneasy — as I write 
Peter Doyle is sitting by the window 
reading — He and Charles Eldridge reg- 
ularly come in and do whatever I want 
and are both very helpful to me — one 
comes daytime and one evening. " 

On May 23 of the same year his 
mother died in Camden, New Jersey, 



WALT WHITMAN 63 

where she had gone to her son George 7 s 
home. Walt was able to reach her 
before her death, but the event was a 
great shock, and he became worse. He 
thereupon abandoned Washington, and 
took up his residence in Camden. 

Besides Drum Taps and its sequel, two 
editions of Leaves of Grass had appeared 
during the Washington period. The 
fourth edition, " Leaves of Grass, New 
York, 1867, " included as supplements 
" Drum Taps" and " Sequel to Drum 
Taps," containing the Lincoln poems, 
and a new section, " Songs before Part- 
ing," comprising "By Blue Ontario's 
Shore," "Song at Sunset," "Assur- 
ances," "So Long," and some minor 
pieces. The fifth edition is " Leaves of 
Grass, Washington, D.C., 1871." 

It was also during the Washington 
period of his life that he wrote the 
poem now known as "Song of the Ex- 
position," read at the opening of the 
American Institute in New York, and 



64 WALT WHITMAN 

u Passage to India. " These were origi- 
nally published as brochures, and then 
included in the later bound copies of the 
Washington edition, the date on the title- 
page being changed to 1872. In 1872 
he wrote for the Dartmouth College 
commencement "As a Strong Bird on 
Pinions Free" ; the poem which is now 
known as "Thou Mother with Thy 
Equal Brood." 

From the first, Whitman seemed more 
popular in England than in America. 
About this time his adherents there 
showed themselves especially strong. In 
1868 William Michael Eossetti published 
his volume of selections. This was with 
Whitman's consent and co-operation, 
and the correspondence in regard to 
the book led to a warm friendship be- 
tween the two. Eossetti called the at- 
tention of his friend Mrs. Anne Gil- 
christ — widow of Alexander Gilchrist, 
author of the Life of William Blake — 
to Whitman' s work. It won her most en- 



WALT WHITMAN 65 

thusiastic admiration immediately. "I 
had not dreamed," she wrote to Ros- 
setti, "that words could cease to be 
words and become electric streams like 
these.' 7 Mrs. Gilchrist wrote to Whit- 
man, and afterward, in 1876, she came 
to America. The friendship which en- 
sued between her and Whitman termi- 
nated only with her death, in 1885. It is 
to her that he refers in the lines entitled 
"Going Somewhere," as his "noblest 
woman friend." Mrs. Gilchrist's letter 
to Eossetti was published in The Radical, 
Boston, May, 1870. It has frequently 
been reprinted both in England and 
in America, and can be found in Dr. 
Bucke's Walt Whitman and in In Re 
Walt Whitman. It was the beginning of 
the reaction in Whitman's favor, and 
there can be no doubt that he re- 
joiced greatly in it. He had written, 
"Whether I come to my own to-day or 
in ten thousand or ten million years, I 
can cheerfully take it now or with equal 



€6 WALT WHITMAN 

cheerfulness I can wait." Still there is 
no reason to suppose that he was not 
pleased to "take it now." He had al- 
ways felt and said that he looked to 
women to understand and accept his 
message first, and here was his expecta- 
tion justified in the appreciation of this 
truly noble woman. Just how much 
direct influence this letter had it is im- 
possible to say, but it is certain that 
at this time a distinct movement in 
Whitman's favor began to manifest it- 
self abroad. Letters came from Tenny- 
son, Symonds, Edward Dowden, Ga- 
briel Sarrazin, Edward Carpenter, Eoden 
Noel, Ernest Rhys, and many others. 
English, German, and French reviewers 
began to consider Whitman seriously. 
Rossetti had already written about him 
in England, and Freiligrath as early as 
1868 had published an essay on Leaves 
of Grass in a German periodical ; but it 
was after Mrs. Gilchrist's letter that the 
recognition from abroad began to take 



WALT WHITMAN 67 

definite form and to become general. 
From then till now intelligent, think- 
ing, broad-minded women have been 
among the foremost and staunchest cham- 
pions of Whitman's cause. 

It has long been the practice of some 
would-be apologists of Whitman to cite 
his services to the soldiers in war-time 
as a sort of raison d'etre for the man. 
His goodness of heart and self-sacrifice 
thus manifested, they argue, might be 
offset against his bad poetry and bad 
morals. It is needless to say that this 
was the view of neither Whitman nor his 
friends. To Whitman the significance of 
the war experience was that the splendid 
defence of the Eepublic by its sons and 
their sacrifices for an ideal fully justified 
his faith in American Democracy and 
his hopes for a greater Democracy. To 
his friends, Whitman's war experience 
meant the concrete realization of the 
spirit of Leaves of Grass in the personal 
life of its author. As he gave willing 



68 WALT WHITMAN 

service and self-sacrifice to his country, 
lie was but one of many ; but, as the con- 
crete practical expression of his written 
word, this period of stress and storm 
represented faith supported and justified 
by works. It is evident that, when 
Whitman said in 1888 that, if it were 
not for the war, Leaves of Grass would 
not be then existing, he meant that it 
would not, without the war, have had 
its full realization. 

It now seems strange, and it is a curi- 
ous example of how the public often 
forms its opinions of literary work from 
hack critics, that "Drum Taps" and 
"When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard 
Bloomed ? ' should not have won instant 
applause. They were free from the al- 
leged uncouthness and indecencies of the 
ante-bellum poems, and contained noth- 
ing to offend the most "malignant 
virtue," to use O'Connor's expressive 
phrase. For graphic intensity "Drum 
Taps" is unsurpassed in the literature 



WALT WHITMAN 69 

of things militant. Of the Lincoln thren- 
ody, Swinburne truly said it was "the 
most sonorous anthem ever chanted in 
the church of the world.'' Swinburne 
showed great enthusiasm for Whitman 
for a while. In his Songs before Sunrise 
he wrote a poem entitled "To Walt 
Whitman in America," beginning : — 

1 ' Send but a song over sea for us, 
Heart of their hearts who are free, 
Heart of their singers to be for us 
More than our singers can be." 

Swinburne 7 s change of attitude — it 
could hardly be a change of opinion — 
is well known, and at a later period he 
took occasion to revile Wliitman pub- 
licly in terms that should make a 
"drunken apple woman reeling in the 
gutter" blush, to use Swinburne's own 
chaste diction. Whitman's comment, 
when he heard the latter pronuncia- 
mento, must be recorded : " Isn't he the 
damnedest simulacrum % ' ' but he showed 



70 WALT WHITMAN 

no feeling on the subject, and was abso- 
lutely undisturbed by the attack. 

"Drum Taps/' unlike most war 
poems, is neither a celebration of indi- 
vidual heroes nor of operations of mighty 
armies, but rather of the individual, 
average American man under the stress 
and strain of the great struggle for na- 
tional existence, — his heroism, his pa- 
tience, his loyalty, and his suffering. 
These poems, while less emphatic in 
their revolt against the established 
canons of literary art than are the 
earlier Leaves, are still sufficiently un- 
conventional in form, and are remarka- 
ble as exhibiting Whitman's wonderful 
skill in word-painting. The themes are 
u Manhattan Arming," the outbreak of 
the war and u the armed host advancing 
to meet it," the battle scenes in Virginia, 
the u Bivouac on the Mountain-side," 
the sights in the hospitals, and finally, 
when the war is over, " Beconciliation, 
word over all, beautiful as the sky. ' ' 



WALT WHITMAN 71 

Considered as lyric poetry, the Lin- 
coln threnody is undoubtedly Whitman's 
masterpiece. 

Lincoln is dead : in the springtide of 
the year and in the springtide of victory, 

"When lilacs last in the dooryard 
bloomed, 
And the great star early droop' d in 
the western sky in the night," 

the poet mourns for the victorious but 
fallen hero. Three images are inextri- 
cably twined in the verse : the lilac 
with its heart-shaped leaves of rich 
green, with its delicate pointed blossoms 
and its pervading perfume j the power- 
ful western fallen star sinking and disap- 
pearing in the black murk ; and the song 
of the hermit thrush. 

"In the swamp in secluded recesses, 
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a 

song. 
Solitary the thrush, 
The hermit withdrawn to himself, 

avoiding the settlements, 
Sings by himself a song." 



72 WALT WHITMAN 

Through, the land passes the funeral 
car, over the breast of the spring, amid 
cities, amid lanes, and through old woods 
where lately the violets peeped from 
the ground, — passing the endless grass, 
passing the yellow- speared wheat every 
grain from its shroud in the dark brown 
fields uprisen, passing the apple-tree 
blows of pink and white in the orchard. 
Through day and night with the great 
cloud darkening the land ; with the 
pomp of inlooped flags and the cities 
draped in black ; with the show of the 
States themselves, as of crape-veiled 
women standing ; with the countless 
torches lighted, the solemn faces and the 
unbared heads ; the dim -lit churches and 
the shuddering organs. To the coffin 
slowly passing through these scenes, 
bearing the hero to where he shall rest 
in the grave, the poet brings his sprig 
of lilac plucked from the bush in the 
dooryard. 
He turns to the western orb sailing the 



WALT WHITMAN 73 

heavens. He knows now what it must 
have meant the month before when he 
walked in the transparent shadowy 
night, and he saw the star had something 
to tell him, as it bent down night after 
night, drooping low down to him, and 
wandering by his side in the solemn 
night, and again as he stood on the ris- 
ing ground in the breeze, and then the 
star was lost in the netherward black of 
the night. 

The hermit thrush is still singing. 
"Limitless out of the dusk, out of the 
cedars and pines," he sings that most 
exquisite of threnodies : — 

"Come lovely and soothing death, 
Undulate round the world, serenely 

arriving, arriving, 
In the day, in the night, to all, to each, 
Sooner or later delicate death." 

And, as the bird sings, the sight that 
was bound in the poet's eyes uncloses, 
and he sees, as in noiseless dreams, hun- 



74 WALT WHITMAN 

dreds of battle flags, borne through the 
smoke of the battles and pierced with 
missiles, carried hither and yon through 
the smoke, torn and bloody, and at last 
but a few shreds left on the staffs, and 
the staffs all splintered and broken. 
He sees the corpses of the young men, 
all the slain soldiers of the war. But he 
sees that they are not as was thought : 
they are fully at rest ; they suffer not. 
The living remain and suffer. 

Loosing the hold of his comrades' 
hands, he passes the visions of the night, 
passes the song of the hermit bird, that 
victorious and powerful psalm in the 
night which had been low and wailing 
and then again bursting with joy, cov- 
ering the earth and filling the spread of 
the heaven ; the poet ceases his song for 
his lustrous comrade of the West. 

" Yet each to keep and all, retrievements 
out of the night, 
The song, the wondrous chant of the 
gray-brown bird, 



WALT WHITMAN 75 

And the tallying chant, the echo arous 7 d 

in my soul, 
With the lustrous and drooping star 

with the countenance full of woe, 
With the holders holding my hand 

nearing the call of the bird, 
Comrades mine, and I in the midst, 

and their memory ever to keep, 

for the dead I loved so well, 
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my 

days and lands — and this for his 

dear sake, 
Lilac and star and bird twined with 

the chant of my soul, 
There in the fragrant pines and the 

cedars dusk and dim." 

John Burroughs knew Whitman in- 
timately. From the autumn of 1863 to 
the time of Whitman's departure from 
Washington he saw him a great deal of 
the time, and visited him yearly in 
Camden during the rest of his life. This 
is his description of him : — 

"In person Whitman was large and 
tall, above six feet, with a breezy open- 



76 WALT WHITMAN 

air look. His temperament was san- 
guine ; his voice was a tender baritone. 
The dominant impression he made was 
that of something fresh and clean. I re- 
member the first time I met him, which 
was in Washington, in the fall of 1863. 
I was impressed by the fine grain and 
clean, fresh quality of the man. Some 
passages in his poems had led me to 
expect something different. He always 
had the look of a man who had just 
taken a bath. The skin was light and 
clear, and the blood well to the surface. 
His body, as I once noticed when we 
were bathing in the surf, had a peculiar 
fresh bloom and fineness and delicacy of 
texture. His physiology was undoubt- 
edly remarkable, unique. The full 
beauty of his face and head did not 
appear till he was past sixty. After 
that, I have little doubt, it was the 
finest head this age or country has seen. 
Every artist who saw him was instantly 
filled with a keen desire to sketch him. 



WALT WHITMAN 77 

The lines were so simple, so free, and so 
strong. High, arching brows ; straight, 
clear-cut nose ; heavy-lidded, blue-gray 
eyes; forehead not thrust out and em- 
phasised, but a vital part of a symmetri- 
cal, dome-shaped head ; ear large, and 
the most delicately carved I have ever 
seen ; the mouth and chin hidden by a 
soft, long, white beard. It seems to me 
his face steadily refined and strength- 
ened with age. Time depleted him in 
just the right way, — softened his beard 
and took away the too florid look ; sub- 
dued the carnal man, and brought out 
more fully the spiritual man. When I 
last saw him (December 26, 1891), 
though he had been Very near death 
for many days, I am sure I had never 
seen his face so beautiful. There was 
no breaking- down of the features, or the 
least sign of decrepitude, such as we 
usually note in an old man. The ex- 
pression was full of pathos, but it was 
as grand as that of a god. I could not 



78 WALT WHITMAN 

think of him as near death, he looked 

so unconquered. 

11 British critics have spoken of Whit- 
man's athleticism, his athletic tempera- 
ment, etc., but he was in no sense a 
muscular man, an athlete. His body, 
though superb, was curiously the body 
of a child ; one saw this in its form, in 
its pink color, and in the delicate texture 
of the skin. He took little interest in 
feats of strength, or in athletic sports. 
He walked with a slow, rolling gait, 
indeed, moved slowly in all ways ; he 
always had an air of infinite leisure. 
For several years, while a clerk in the 
Attorney- General's Office in Washington, 
his exercise for an hour each day con- 
sisted in tossing a few feet into the air, 
as he walked, a round, smooth stone, of 
about one pound weight, and catching it 
as it fell. Later in life, and after his first 
paralytic stroke, when in the woods, he 
liked to bend down the young saplings, 
and exercise his arms and chest in that 
way." 



III. Camden and Invalidism. 
Welcome, ineffable grace of dying days ! 



And I myself for long, O Death, have 

breath'' d my every breath 
Amid the nearness and the silent thought of 

thee. 
For nineteen years Whitman walked 
in the valley of the shadow of death. 
For two years following his removal to 
Camden he was physically prostrated, 
and during the whole of this period he 
was a half-paralyzed invalid. I cannot 
do better than to quote from Dr. Bucke's 
Walt Whitman: "And now for several 
years, his life hung upon a thread. 
Though he suffered at times severely, 
he never became dejected or impatient. 
It was said by one of his friends that in 
that combination of illness, poverty, and 
old age, Walt Whitman has been more 
grand than in the full vigor of manhood. 
A little while after he became incapaci- 
tated by illness, he was discharged from 



80 WALT WHITMAN 

his government clerkship and everything 
like an income entirely ceased. So that 
I know that during those years Walt 
Whitman had to bear the imminent 
prospect of death, great pain and suffer- 
ing at times, poverty, his poetic enter- 
prise a failure, and the face of the 
public either clouded in contempt or 
turned away in indifference." 

During the earlier part of his residence 
in Camden he was an inmate of the 
household of his brother George in 
Stevens Street. While he was on the 
friendliest terms with Colonel Whitman 
and his wife, he seemed to long for 
greater freedom than he could enjoy 
while he was obliged, to some extent at 
least, to conform to the domestic arrange- 
ments of any one's family ; and, after the 
attempted suppression of his book in 
Boston had stimulated its sale to an un- 
wonted degree, he took the royalty 
proceeds and with some assistance from 
friends bought the u shack," as he 



WALT WHITMAN 81 

called it, in Mickle Street so well known 
as the home of his latter days. It was 
rather a miserable little two -story frame 
house in a neighborhood not especially 
agreeable, but with his simple tastes it 
answered his purpose very well. 

The first considerable literary under- 
taking after his removal to Camden was 
the issuing of the Centennial or author's 
edition in 1876. This consisted of two 
volumes, Leaves of Grass and Two Biv- 
ulets. The former was practically a re- 
print of the edition of 1871 with a few 
poems intercalated. The Two Rivulets 
was a collection of prose and verse, and 
included " Democratic Vistas," " Cen- 
tennial Songs," and " Passage to India," 
all of which had previously appeared 
in pamphlet form, together with seven- 
teen new poems, among them " Eido- 
lons," "The Prayer of Columbus," 
"To a Locomotive in Winter," "Song 
of the Eedwood Tree," and "Song of 
the Universal." 



82 WALT WHITMAN 

This Centennial edition was warmly 
taken up by a party of English friends, 
headed by William Michael Eossetti. 
Eobert Buchanan had published some- 
thing to the effect that Whitman was 
altogether neglected and starving. Al- 
though Whitman was poor, this was de- 
cidedly an overstatement and caused 
him some annoyance. He never asked 
his English or other friends for pecuni- 
ary assistance, but he did ask them to 
buy his book. Bossetti's appeal was 
well responded to, and a good many 
copies of this edition went abroad. 
Whitman was highly appreciative of 
this assistance from his English friends, 
and, in fact, it did carry him over a 
very serious crisis. He writes, " Those 
blessed gales from the British Isles prob- 
ably — certainly — saved me. ' ' 

After the first two years of Whit- 
man's residence in Camden he had re- 
covered his health sufficiently to make 
short trips into the country ; and he 



WALT WHITMAN 83 

spent a considerable part of his time at 
the farm-house of his friends the Staf- 
fords, on Timber Creek, twelve or thir- 
teen miles from where it flows into the 
Delaware. He describes it as a " charm- 
ing recluse and rural spot," and it 
seems to have afforded him great enjoy- 
ment. He lived half the time along the 
creek and its adjacent fields and lanes j 
and probably to his out-of-door life 
there he owed his partial recovery from 
the prostration of 1874-75, — "a sort of 
second wind or semi -renewal of the lease 
of life," he calls it. His account of 
these bucolic scenes is, perhaps, the 
most charming part of his Specimen 
Bays diary: "Dear, soothing, healthy, 
restoration hours — after three confining 
years of paralysis — after the long strain 
of the war and its wounds and death." 
It had long been Whitman's wish on 
every anniversary of Lincoln's assassina- 
tion "to gather a few friends and hold 
its tragic reminiscence." He was not 



84 WALT WHITMAN 

able to do this very often, but in further- 
ance of the idea be prepared the lecture 
which he delivered for the first time in 
New York, April 14, 1879. It was the 
occasion of a very brilliant ovation to 
Whitman, — the first he ever received, — 
and the theatre was thronged with the 
men and women best known in Ameri- 
can letters. 

By September, 1879, Whitman found 
himself strong enough to undertake a 
long jaunt West, lasting three or four 
months. He visited Colorado, and pene- 
trated the Eocky Mountain region far 
enough to get a good notion of it. In 
" this plenitude of material, entire ab- 
sence of art, untrammelF d play of prim- 
itive Nature — the chasm, the gorge, the 
crystal mountain stream, repeated scores, 
hundreds of miles — the broad hand- 
ling and absolute uncrampedness — the 
fantastic forms, bathed in transparent 
browns, faint reds and grays, towering 
sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or 



WALT WHITMAN 85 

three thousand feet high — at their tops 
now and then huge masses pois'd, and 
mixing with the clouds, with only their 
outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible " 
— in such scenes he found the law of 
his own poems. On his return journey 
he spent nearly three months with 
his brother "Jeff" in St. Louis, and 
reached Camden early in January, 1880. 
In June of that year he made a visit to 
Dr. Bucke at London, Ontario, and with 
Dr. Bucke took a trip through the Great 
Lakes and the St. Lawrence. 

In August, 1881, he was putting the 
last touches to the new edition of Leaves 
of Grass, — "the completed book at 
last," he calls it; J and so it is, for, 
except that three "annexes," "Sands 
at Seventy," "Good-Bye my Fancy," 
and "Old Age Echoes," comprising 
later poems, have been added, it is the 
book as we have it to-day. 

Early in May of that year Whitman 
had received a letter from his friend 



86 WALT WHITMAN 

John Boyle O'Beilly, saying that James 
B. Osgood & Co. wished to see the copy 
for the new edition of Leaves of Grass 
that Whitman contemplated bringing 
ont. Whitman npon the strength of 
this wrote to Osgood ontlining the plan 
on which he wanted the book produced, 
and warning him that "the sexuality 
odes, about which the original row was 
started and kept up so long, are all re- 
tained and must go in the same as ever." 
Osgood thereupon wrote for the copy, 
which was sent May 27 and immediately 
accepted. After some further corre- 
spondence in reference to royalties, por- 
traits to be included, and other details, 
the formal contract was signed on Oc- 
tober 1, Whitman having gone to Boston 
to supervise the publication. He seems 
to have enjoyed the trip to Boston 
greatly, and he devotes several pages of 
Specimen Bays to describing his visits to 
Longfellow, Sanborn, Emerson, Alcott, 
and others. It was the first time he 



WALT WHITMAN 87 

ever visited Emerson at the latter' s 
home, and it was a memorable occur- 
rence to him. When the book was 
ready for issue, Whitman returned to 
Camden, conscious that at last he had 
secured a publisher of national reputa- 
tion. Upwards of two thousand copies 
had been sold, and the sales were 
steadily continuing, when on March 1, 
1882, the publishers received a notice 
from Oliver Stevens, the District At- 
torney at Boston, that Leaves of Grass 
was officially classified as obscene litera- 
ture, and stating that, unless the book 
was withdrawn from publication and 
the edition suppressed, the publishers 
would be proceeded against. The pub- 
lishers enclosed the letter to Whitman, 
saying they were not informed what 
portions of the book were objected to, 
and asking whether he would consent 
to withdraw the obnoxious features. 
Whitman replied — and it is the only 
instance where he made any such con- 



88 WALT WHITMAN 

cession — that lie would be willing to 
cancel a few lines, which he thought 
might be the offending ones, apparently 
having no conception of the wholesale 
expurgation necessary to satisfy the offi- 
cial sense of decorum. 

Under date of March 21, Osgood & Co. 
wrote to Whitman, enclosing a list of 
the passages of which the District At- 
torney demanded it should be expunged. 
They included the whole of " A Woman 
Waits for Me," "To a Common Pros- 
titute,' 7 and "The Dalliance of the 
Eagles/' besides nearly two hundred 
other lines scattered throughout the 
book. Whitman replied that the list 
"whole and several" was rejected by 
him, and would not be thought of under 
any circumstances. Osgood & Co. then 
wrote that they thought the official mind 
would be satisfied by the omission of "A 
Woman Waits for Me ' ' and " To a Com- 
mon Prostitute." Whitman replied, 
"No, I cannot consent to leave out the 



WALT WHITMAN 89 

two pieces." Osgood then declined 
further to circulate the book, and an ar- 
rangement was made by which the plates 
and remaining copies of the edition were 
turned over to the author. Whitman 
did not seem to be at all disturbed ; but, 
naturally, his friends were very angry. 
O' Connor sent one of his trumpet-blasts 
to the New York Tribune, which, strange 
to say, printed it ; and even conserva- 
tive literary men, who had no especial 
sympathy with Whitman, denounced 
the proceeding, George William Curtis, 
for instance, writing that it was an out- 
rage on the freedom of letters, and that 
every author who realized this should 
take part in the defence, regardless of 
his opinion of Whitman. 

The plates were taken by Eees, Welsh 
& Co., of Philadelphia, who were suc- 
ceeded by David McKay. The advertis- 
ing accorded the book had its natural 
result. The sale was greatly augmented, 
and in a short time Whitman received 



90 WALT WHITMAN 

sufficient money from royalties to carry 
out the purchase of the house in Mickle 
Street. This was the last official attack 
on Leaves of Grass, which has had a 
moderate and steady sale ever since. 

It transpired later that neither Stevens, 
the District Attorney, nor the Massachu- 
setts Attorney- General had any knowl- 
edge of the book beyond the passages 
that had been pointed out to them by 
somebody connected with the New Eng- 
land Society for the Suppression of Vice, 
and Stevens seemed to be somewhat 
ashamed of himself when he learned the 
true nature of his action and the storm 
it had raised. Of course, it was no ex- 
cuse for their official act that the Attor- 
ney-General and District Attorney did 
not know what they were doing ; but at 
least they can be acquitted of the charge 
of malevolence, and condemned only 
for their official stupidity. Of course, 
from the Vice Society nothing else was 
to be expected. Osgood & Co. suffered 



WALT WHITMAN 91 

very severe criticism. It may be they 
were not morally required to undergo 
martyrdom in a cause which they per- 
haps regarded as none of theirs ; but at 
the present time it certainly seems that 
not only would it have been braver to 
have stood by their client, but also the 
better policy. It is said that they after- 
wards expressed regret that they had 
weakly yielded, and the District Attor- 
ney that he had not sufficiently ac- 
quainted himself with the nature of the 
book before taking action. Whitman 
was entirely unruffled, and never ex- 
pressed animosity against any one con- 
cerned. He had been engaged in mak- 
ing a collection of his prose writings, 
under the title of Specimen Days and Col- 
lect; and this was brought out by Eees, 
Welsh & Co. as a companion volume to 
Leaves of Grass. These two volumes, 
with subsequent additions to each, com- 
prise Whitman's works as they appear 
to-day. 



92 WALT WHITMAN 

The remaining ten years of Whitman's 
life were outwardly uneventful, and were 
spent amid what should accompany old 
age, — love, honor, troops of friends. 

When he was strong enough and the 
weather was pleasant, he would sit in his 
chair in front of his house, and passing 
acquaintances or strangers would stop 
and speak to him, or the children make 
him their playfellow. A number of his 
friends made him a present of a horse 
and phaeton, which for a few years af- 
forded him great comfort j but in 1888 
they were sold under the conviction that 
they would never again be needed. 
Subsequently his excursions were made 
in his wheel-chair, by means of which 
he was enabled to go down to the Dela- 
ware and observe the sights and sounds 
of the river. 

His reading was extensive both in 
classic and in current literature, includ- 
ing periodicals and newspapers ; thus he 
kept well informed regarding the events 



WALT WHITMAN 93 

of the day. Among contemporary 
writers, Carlyle, Emerson/ and Inger- 
soll were his particular favorites. He 
did not care especially for Buskin. He 
let political and religious controversies 
alone, as a rule, and ignored theological 
periodicals and books. Especially in- 
teresting discussions, however, some- 
times keenly attracted his attention, 
such as those of Ingersoll and Huxley. 
He greatly liked Tolstoy's fiction, but 
was offended by the introspection and 
pessimism of his later works. Ibsen did 
not attract him. He disclaimed suffi- 
cient familiarity with Browning to judge 
of him, but recognized the strength of 
parts of his work. Burroughs thought 
Whitman the best critic in America. 

While, of course, he was one of the 
greatest of reformers, he would not read 
reform books nor associate himself with 
any special reform system. His ideas of 
reform were spiritual, — included all, 
anarchist, socialist, democrat, aristocrat, 



94 WALT WHITMAN 

but none could specialize or appro- 
priate him. 

To Sidney Morse, in 1887, lie said that 
the labor problem, as a practical question, 
belonged to younger heads than his, if 
there really was anything to be said or 
done about it. He was not sure but 
things were working well enough as they 
were, evolving in their natural course 
far better results than any theory of 
socialism could promise. Evils were 
being sloughed off about as fast as they 
could be, he thought. But he could not 
go into it. There was more talk any- 
way on the subject than was warranted 
by the situation or good for the work- 
ingmen themselves. So far as he could 
see, there was as much " cussed selfish- 
ness" on the one side as the other. It 
was a question of manhood, if anything. 
Workinginen's strikes were apt to de- 
velop little of that. They would set on 
their fellow-workingmen who did not 
belong to their "union" like tigers or 



WALT WHITMAN 95 

other beasts of prey. It was their 
' ' union " against the world. The 
spectacle was not pleasing. "Let the 
worker, whoever he be, accept the situa- 
tion, and triumph on the side of manli- 
ness in spite of it. Then he would bring 
to his side the world's sympathy. Let 
him ride down his temptations to be 
mean and niggardly, even in dire ex- 
tremity, as a hero would, and his cause 
is won. Let him say to the l scab,' l Thy 
necessities are as great or greater than 
mine,' rivalling Sir Philip Sidney. 
1 How can a man be hid f ' old Confucius 
asked. How can he ? or despoiled ? No 
capitalist can rob any man of his man- 
hood. When the labor agitation is 
other than a kicking of somebody else 
out to let myself in, I shall warm up to 
it, maybe." At other times he betrayed 
an anxiety in behalf of the "masses 
driven to the wall," and felt that some- 
how the Eepublic was not safe while 
" anybody was being so driven." 



96 WALT WHITMAN 

It is by no means to be understood by 
this that Whitman was not fully alive to 
the evils of the social and economic situ- 
ation or the dangers lurking in it. This 
he made clear many times both in writ- 
ing and in conversation, as, for instance, 
in the following terrible indictment of 
society in Democratic Vistas : — 

u l say we had best look our times and 
lands searchingly in the face, like a 
physician diagnosing some deep disease. 
Never was there, perhaps, more hollow- 
ness at heart than at present, and here 
in the United States. Genuine belief 
seems to have left us. The underlying 
principles of the States are not honestly 
belie v'd in. . . . What penetrating eye 
does not everywhere see through the 
mask % The spectacle is appaling. We 
live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy 
throughout. The men believe not in 
the women, nor the women in the men. 
A scornful superciliousness rules in liter- 
ature. The aim of all the litterateurs is 



WALT WHITMAN 97 

to find something to make fun of. A 
lot of churches, sects, &c., the most 
dismal phantasms I know, usurp the 
name of religion. Conversation is a 
mass of badinage. From deceit in the 
spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the 
offspring is already incalculable. An 
acute and candid person, in the revenue 
department in Washington, who is led 
by the course of his employment to regu- 
larly visit the cities, north, south and 
west, to investigate frauds, has talk'd 
much with me about his discoveries. 
The depravity of the business classes of 
our country is not less than has been 
supposed, but infinitely greater. The 
official services of America, national, 
state, and municipal, in all their 
branches and departments, except the 
judiciary, are saturated in corruption, 
bribery, falsehood, mal- administration j 
and the judiciary is tainted. The great 
cities reek with respectable as much as 
non-respectable robbery and scoundrel- 



98 WALT WHITMAN 

ism. In fashionable life, flippancy, 
tepid amours, weak infidelism, small 
aims, or no aims at all, only to kill 
time. In business, (this all-devouring 
modern word, business,) the one sole 
object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. 
The magician's serpent in the fable ate 
up all the other serpents ; and money- 
making is our magician's serpent, re- 
maining to-day sole master of the field. 
The best class we show, is but a mob of 
fashionably dress' d speculators and vul- 
garians. True, indeed, behind this fan- 
tastic farce, enacted on the visible stage 
of society, solid things and stupendous 
labors are to be discover' d, existing 
crudely and going on in the background, 
to advance and tell themselves in time. 
Yet the truths are none the less terrible. 
I say that our New World democracy, 
however great a success in uplifting the 
masses out of their sloughs, in materi- 
alistic development, products, and in 
a certain highly- deceptive superficial 



WALT WHITMAN 99 

popular intellectuality, is, so far, an 
almost complete failure in its social 
aspects, and in really grand religious, 
moral, literary, and esthetic results. In 
vain do we march with unprecedented 
strides to empire so colossal, outvying 
the antique, beyond Alexander's, be- 
yond the proudest sway of Eome. In 
vain have we annex' d Texas, California, 
Alaska, and reach north for Canada and 
south for Cuba. It is as if we were 
somehow being endow' d with a vast and 
more and more thoroughly-appointed 
body, and then left with little or no 
soul." 

While he was, in a sense, in sympathy 
with the spirit of the various overt at- 
tempts to remove the evil, he was not 
convinced of the efficiency or absolute 
justice of any of the organized schemes 
for social redemption. It was not that 
he advocated laissez-faire nor believed 
that the evils would right themselves, 
but he felt that the true remedies are 



LofC. 



100 WALT WHITMAN 

spiritual and must proceed from within 
outward, not mechanical for external 
application. Faith, individualism, soli- 
darity, he believed to be the true anti- 
septics. u Produce great persons, the 
rest follows" ; and to Dr. Bucke he 
said, "I have imagined a life which 
should be that of the average man, in 
average circumstances, but still grand, 
heroic." 

One of the best pen sketches of Whit- 
man in his old age is given by Dr. John 
Johnston, of Bolton, England, and is 
quoted by John Burroughs in his Whit- 
man, a Study. The present writer saw 
Whitman a few years earlier, in his 
room in Mickle Street, and, except for 
the difference those few years made, his 
recollection corresponds exactly with 
Dr. Johnston's description. 

"The first thing about himself that 
struck me," says Dr. Johnston, "was 
the physical immensity and magnificent 
proportions of the man, and, next, the 



WALT WHITMAN 101 

picturesque majesty of his presence as a 
whole. 

"He sat quite erect in a great cane- 
runged chair, cross-legged, and clad in 
rough gray clothes, with slippers on his 
feet, and a shirt of pure white linen, 
with a great wide collar edged with lace,, 
the shirt buttoned about midway down 
his breast, the big lapels of the collar 
thrown open, the points touching his 
shoulders, and exposing the upper por- 
tion of his hirsute chest. He wore a 
vest of gray homespun, but it was un- 
buttoned almost to the bottom. He had 
no coat on and his shirt sleeves were 
turned up above the elbows, exposing 
most beautifully shaped arms, and flesh 
of the most delicate whiteness. Al- 
though it was so hot, he did not perspire 
visibly, while I had to keep mopping 
my face. His hands are large and mas- 
sive, but in perfect proportion to the 
arms j the fingers long, strong, white, 
and tapering to a blunt end. His nails 



102 WALT WHITMAN 

are square, showing about an eighth of 
an inch separate from the flesh, and I 
noticed that there was not a particle of 
impurity beneath any of them. But his 
majesty is concentrated in his head, 
which is set with leonine grace and dig- 
nity upon his broad, square shoulders j 
and it is almost entirely covered with 
long, fine, straggling hair, silvery and 
glistening, pure and white as sunlit 
snow, rather thin on the top of his high, 
rounded crown, streaming over and 
around his large but delicately-shaped 
ears, down the back of his big neck ; 
and, from his pinky-white cheeks and 
top lip, over the lower part of his face, 
right down to the middle of his chest, 
like a cataract of materialized, white, 
glistening vapor, giving him a most 
venerable and patriarchal appearance. 
His high, massive forehead is seamed 
with wrinkles. His nose is large, strong, 
broad, and prominent, but beautifully 
chiselled and proportioned, almost 



WALT WHITMAN 103 

straight, very slightly depressed at the 
tip, and with deep furrows on each side, 
running down to the angles of the 
mouth. The eyebrows are thick and 
shaggy, with strong, white hair, very 
highly arched and standing a long way 
above the eyes, which are of a light blue 
with a tinge of gray, small, rather 
deeply set, calm, clear, penetrating, and 
revealing unfathomable depths of tenr 
derness, kindness, and sympathy. The 
upper eyelids . droop considerably over 
the eyeballs. The lips, which are partly 
hidden by the thick, white moustache, 
are full. The whole face impresses one 
with a sense of resoluteness, strength, 
and intellectual power, and yet withal a 
winning sweetness, unconquerable radi- 
ance, and hopeful joyousness. His voice 
is highly pitched and musical, with a 
timbre which is astonishing in an old 
man. There is none of the tremor, 
quaver, or shrillness usually observed in 
them, but his utterance is clear, ring- 



104 WALT WHITMAN 

ing, and most sweetly musical. But it 
was not in any one of these features that 
his charm lay so much as in his tout en- 
semble, and the irresistible magnetism of 
his sweet, aromatic presence, which 
seemed to exhale sanity, purity, and 
naturalness, and exercised over me an 
attraction which positively astonished 
me, producing an exaltation of mind 
and soul which no man's presence ever 
■did before. I felt that I was here face 
to face with the living embodiment of 
all that was good, noble, and lovable in 
humanity.' ' 

During the period from 1884 until his 
death in 1892, Whitman was greatly 
aided and sustained by some of his 
immediate friends and neighbors, es- 
pecially Thomas B. Harned and Horace 
Traubel, who, with Dr. Bucke, became 
his literary executors. Traubel, indeed, 
devoted his time and service almost en- 
tirely to him. Without his aid Whit- 
man wonld not have been able to bring 



WALT WHITMAN 105 

out his last two books, November Boughs 
and Good-Bye my Fancy. Beginning in 
1887, a consecutive and detailed diary 
record was kept by Traubel of all 
of Whitman's almost daily conversations 
with him. This has just now (1904) 
been announced for publication under 
the title of With Walt Whitman in Cam- 
den, 

On the night of Washington's birth- 
day, 1887, the Contemporary Club gave 
Whitman a reception in Philadelphia. 
Although he was very feeble at the 
time, the affair was most successful. He 
read from his own and other poems, and 
entered fully into the spirit of the oc- 
casion. 

On June 2, 1888, as he was engaged 
in preparing November Boughs for the 
press, he suffered another paralytic 
stroke. For a few days his life was al- 
most despaired of, and from that time on 
he was much more feeble. After some 
necessary delay he produced November 



106 WALT WHITMAN 

Boughs, following it with a large single- 
volume edition of his complete works, 
limited to 600 autographed copies, which 
was handled by himself as a personal 
edition. 

In 1889 the poet's seventieth birthday- 
was celebrated by a public meeting and 
a complimentary dinner given to him 
by the citizens of Camden. A large com- 
pany assembled in Morgan's Hall, and 
prominent citizens of both Camden and 
Philadelphia paid tribute to the poet 
and voiced the affectionate regard of his 
neighbors. Among the speakers who 
came from a distance were Herbert H. 
Gilchrist, Eichard Watson Gilder, Julian 
Hawthorne, and Hamlin Garland ; while 
telegrams and letters of congratulation 
were received from many of Whitman's 
most prominent contemporaries on both 
sides of the ocean, among these being 
messages from William Morris, John 
Hay, Howells, Whittier, Thomas Bailey 
Aldrich, and Mark Twain. Whitman 



WALT WHITMAN 107 

also celebrated this birthday by publish- 
ing a beautiful pocket edition of Leaves 
of Grass with a special commemorative 
note upon its title-page. Of this edition 
only 300 copies were issued, all of which 
were signed by the author. 

On April 15, 1890, the Contemporary 
Club gave him a second reception. He 
was very ill with an attack of the grippe, 
and it was uncertain until almost the 
last moment whether he could attend j 
but his indomitable will carried him 
through, and he read his Lincoln address 
with his usual strong, melodious voice. 

Whitman's intimate relations with his 
friends, and his devotion to them and 
theirs to him, continued to the last. 
For several years before Whitman's 
death it had been customary with a few 
of his friends to celebrate his birthday 
with a dinner. Perhaps the most nota- 
ble of these occasions was that at Eeisser's 
in Philadelphia, May 31, 1890, where 
Ingersoll spoke and where occurred the 



108 WALT WHITMAK 

debate upon immortality between Inger- 
soll and Whitman, partly reported in In 
Be Walt Whitman. 

Whitman's last appearance in public 
was on the occasion of IngersolPs lect- 
ure, Liberty in Literature, which was 
given for his benefit at Horticultural 
Hall in Philadelphia, October 21, 1890. 
He was wheeled on to the stage in his 
chair, and, when the lecture was finished, 
he said: " After all, my friends, the 
main factors being the curious testimony 
called personal presence and face to face 
meeting, I have come here to be among 
you and show myself, and thank you 
with my living voice for coming, and 
Robert Ingersoll for speaking. And so 
with such brief testimony of showing 
myself, and such good will and grati- 
tude, I bid you hail and farewell. 77 
There were about eighteen hundred peo- 
ple present, and the proceeds to Whit- 
man were about eight hundred and 
seventy dollars. 



WALT WHITMAN 109 

The birthday dinner in 1891 was in 
his own house, as he was too ill to 
go out. Thirty-three people were pres- 
ent. Whitman was in bad physical con- 
dition, and was almost carried to the 
table. The conversation around the 
board — there were no formal speeches 
— is recorded under the heading, 
" Bound Table with Walt Whitman " 
in In Be Walt Whitman. 

In December, 1891, he became so ill 
that he was declared by the physicians to 
be dying; but he rallied somewhat, and 
lived till March 26, 1892. During these 
last months, although suffering great 
pain, his cheerfulness was unimpaired, 
and the end came simply and peacefully. 
He was conscious to the last, calm and 
undisturbed. 

The funeral on March 30, while devoid 
of form or ceremony, was perhaps the 
most remarkable demonstration that ever 
occurred in this country in connection 
with the obsequies of a private citizen. 



110 WALT WHITMAN 

From eleven till two a stream of people, 
thousands in number, passed through 
the parlor of the little house to look 
upon the face of the dead poet. On the 
way to the cemetery the road was 
thronged with people. At the grave- 
side, stretching up the hillside and down 
toward the lake as far as the eye could 
reach, was an uncounted multitude, eager 
to catch the words of the speakers, In- 
gersoll and the rest ; and in their pres- 
ence the body of the great poet of De- 
mocracy was laid away. 



IV. Eetrospect and Conclusion. 

My foothold is tenon? d and mortis 1 d in 

granite, 
I laugh at what you call dissolution. 
And I know the amplitude of time. 

The brief sketch of the objective 
career of Walt Whitman is thus closed j 
but his true life is only to be read in his 
Leaves of Grass and in his prose writing, 
which is the best commentary on his 
poems. Not the least remarkable feature 
of Whitman's career and that of his book 
is the singular pertinacity with which he 
carried out the work he had determined 
upon. It was his original intention that 
it should cover his whole lifetime, and 
from this plan he never swerved nor 
faltered. The book was planned before 
he was thirty years of age, actually 
begun a little later, and completed only 
on his death- bed. He intended it, as he 
many times said, as the expression of 
the personality of the American man. 



112 WALT WHITMAN 

This personality is to be developed 
through individualism, comradeship, 
spirituality. To use his own words, — 

"My comrade ! 

For you to share with me two great- 
nesses, and a third one rising in- 
clusive and more resplendent, 

The greatness of Love and Democracy, 
and the greatness of Beligion." 

The oft- repeated charge of egotism, in 
the narrow sense of the word, rests solely 
upon a small and distorted construction 
of detached passages. The " Myself' 7 is 
' ' the Average Man, ' ' — any man , — the 
" personal critter," as Whitman was 
fond of saying in conversation. He 
would accept nothing that all could not 
have the counterpart of on equal terms, 
and ' ' nothing, not God is greater to one 
than one's self is." "He does not out- 
line, but he forecasts a new religion and a 
new order of the state, the amplitude 
and splendor of humanity." 

The denial of the charge of egotism 



WALT WHITMAN 113 

applies of course only to the paltry- 
egotism of personal vanity. In the 
splendid self-assertion of genius he is 
no more deficient than Montaigne when 
in the preface to his Essays he says : "I 
desire therein to be delineated in mine 
owne genuine, simple and ordinarie fash- 
ion, without contention, art or study j 
for it is myselfe I pourtray. My imper- 
fections shall therein be read to the life, 
and my naturall forme discerned, so 
farre-forth as publike reverence hath 
permitted me. For if my fortune had 
beene to have lived among those nations 
which yet are said to live under the 
sweet liberty of Nature's first and un- 
corrupted lawes, I assure thee, I would 
most willingly have pourtrayed myselfe 
fully and naked. Thus, gentle Eeader, 
myselfe am the ground- worke of my 
booke." His egotism was not different 
in quality from that of Francis Bacon 
when he declared that he had taken 
all knowledge to be his province j or 



114 WALT WHITMAN 

Shakespeare when he wrote the fifty-fifth 
sonnet : — 

"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful 

rhyme ; 
But you shall shine more bright in 

these contents 
Than unswept stone, besmear' d with 

sluttish time." 

In like spirit Whitman said : — 

"I know I am august, 
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate 

itself or be understood, 
I see that the elementary laws never 

apologize, 
(I reckon I behave no prouder than 

the level I plant my house by, 

after all.) 

u I exist as I am, that is enough, 
If no other in the world be aware I sit 

content, 
And if each and all be aware I sit con- 
tent. 

" One world is aware and by far the larg- 
est to me, and that is myself." 



WALT WHITMAN 115 

It is true that in his thought the uni- 
verse is ego- centric ; but the central Ego 
is no more Walt Whitman than any other 
man or woman. It is "you, whoever 
you are." 

i l We thought our Union grand, and our 

Constitution grand, 
I do not say they are not grand and 

good, for they are, 
I am this day just as much in love with 

them as you, 
Then I am in love with You, and with 

all my fellows upon the earth. 

"We consider bibles and religions di- 
vine — I do not say they are not 
divine, 

I say they have all grown out of you, 
and may grow out of you still, 

It is not they who give the life, it is 
you who give the life, 

Leaves are not more shed from the 
trees, or trees from the earth, than 
they are shed out of you." 

It is quite evident that Whitman felt 
that he had a cause, and that to it he de- 



116 WALT WHITMAN 

liberately devoted his life's work; that 
he felt the cause to be of supreme impor- 
tance and himself to be the prophet of 
it, — if this be egotism, the critics are free 
to make the most of it. He showed no 
egotism in the sense of claiming individ- 
ual superiority over any of his fellow- 
men. On the contrary, his attitude was 
that of one who could approach "the 
President at his levee" or "Cudge in 
the sugar field/ 7 and greet each on 
equal terms j and this is manifested as 
well in his life as in his work. 

We sometimes hear it said that Whit- 
man was ' ' devoid of the sense of humor. ' ' 
It is a little uncertain just what is 
meant by this phrase. Of course, he was 
not a humorous man in the sense that 
Dr. Holmes was ; nor was he especially 
brilliant in conversation, though he was 
fully appreciative of a humorous situa- 
tion. If a lack of the sense of humor 
means — as I have sometimes heard it 
defined — taking one's self too seriously, 



WALT WHITMAN 117 

the question has been considered in the 
discussion of egotism. My own under- 
standing of the phrase ■ ' sense of humor, > ' 
in its deepest meaning, is a sense of the 
due proportion of things, with keen 
perception of incongruities; and, so con- 
sidered, it appears to me that Whit- 
man had the sense of humor in the 
highest degree. A deep, pervasive, 
subtle humor permeates his work. Take, 
for example, such lines as these in the 
"Song of Myself »: — 

i • I think I could turn and live with 
animals, they are so placid and self- 
contain' d, 
I stand and look at them long and long. 

"They do not sweat and whine about 

their condition, 
They do not lie awake in the dark and 

weep for their sins, 
They do not make me sick discussing 

their duty to God, 
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is 

demented with the mania of owning 

things, 



118 WALT WHITMAN 

Not one kneels to another, nor to his 
kind that lived thousands of years 
ago, 

Not one is respectable or unhappy over 
the whole earth. 

" So they show their relations to me and 
I accept them, 
They bring me tokens of myself, they 
evince them plainly in their posses- 
sion." 

It may be that the lack of the sense of 
humor — that is, of due proportion — is 
the critic's. 

Two sections of Leaves of Grass, "Chil- 
dren of Adam" and "Calamus," seem 
to call for a few words of special notice. 
The first of these is a celebration of the 
sex function, not in the way of chivalric 
sentiment, but rather by exalting the 
nobleness and dignity of fatherhood and 
motherhood and the sacredness of the 
natural sex relation in itself. Whit- 
man's treatment of this subject has been 
assailed with a decree of vehemence that 



WALT WHITMAN 119 

could have had its origin only in 
prudery and pruriency, twin offspring 
of mediaeval asceticism. In spite of all 
opposition, Whitman adhered to his 
own idea in this matter, and to the last 
considered it the rock-bed foundation of 
his work. " Sex will not be put aside ; 
it is a great ordinance of the universe/ J 
he said in the first preface. 

Perhaps the most convincing testimony 
that can be offered in support of Whit- 
man's treatment of the matter of sex will 
be to show how " Children of Adam" 
impressed a noble and high-minded 
woman, who was, at that time, entirely 
uninfluenced by any personal acquaint- 
ance with their author. Eeference has 
already been made to Mrs. Gilchrist, 
whose letters, written in 1869 to William 
Michael Eossetti, were considered by him 
the most valuable appreciation of Whit- 
man which has been put into writing, 
11 because it is the expression of what 
a woman sees in Whitman's poems, — a 



120 WALT WHITMAN 

woman who has read and thought much, 
and whom to know is to respect and 
esteem in every relation, whether of 
character, intellect, or culture. " It is to 
be regretted that space will not permit 
the reprinting here of the entire text of 
her comments, at least upon these par- 
ticular poems; but these brief extracts 
will indicate their tenor, and, it is hoped, 
lead the reader to a perusal of the whole 
of her splendid defence : — 

"You argued rightly that my confi- 
dence would not be betrayed by any of 
the poems in this book. None of them 
troubled me even for a moment ; be- 
cause I saw at a glance that it was not, as 
men had supposed, the heights brought 
down to the depths, but the depths 
lifted up level with the sunlit heights, 
that they might become clear and sun- 
lit too. Always, for a woman, a veil 
woven out of her own soul — never 
touched upon even, with a rough hand, 
by this poet. But, for a man, a daring, 



WALT WHITMAN 121 

fearless pride in himself, not a mock- 
modesty woven out of delusions — a 
very poor imitation of a woman's. Do 
they not see that this fearless pride, this 
complete acceptance of themselves, is 
needful for her pride, her justifica- 
tion? . . . 

"'The full spread pride of man is 
calming and excellent to the soul,' — of 
a woman above all. It is true that in- 
stinct of silence I spoke of is a beauti- 
ful, imperishable part of nature too. 
But it is not beautiful when it means 
an ignominious shame brooding darkly. 
Shame is like a very flexible veil, that 
follows faithfully the shape of what it 
covers — beautiful when it hides a beau- 
tiful thing, ugly when it hides an ugly 
one. It has not covered what was 
beautiful here ; it has covered a mean 
distrust of a man's self and of his Crea- 
tor. It was needed that this silence, 
this evil spell, should for once be 
broken, and the daylight let in, that 



122 WALT WHITMAN 

the dark cloud lying under might be 
scattered to the winds. It was needed 
that one who could here indicate for us 
' the part between reality and the soul J 
should speak. That is what these beau- 
tiful, despised poems, the 'Children of 
Adam,' do, read by the light that glows 
out of the rest of the volume.' 7 

The section entitled " Calamus' ' ex- 
alts the splendor of the friendship be- 
tween man and man, which is here 
glorified in a manner elsewhere unknown 
and unapproached in modern times. 
Not alone do these glowing poems — of 
which it has been said that they make 
other writings on friendship seem frigid 
and calculating — celebrate the indi- 
vidual joy and satisfaction of comrade 
love $ they have also a deeper signifi- 
cance and a relation to the body politic. 
Whitman saw in "the manly love of 
comrades ' ' a solvent for the evils of our 
civilization to-day, and the hope of the 
true and ideal Democracy of the Future. 



WALT WHITMAN 123 

u Affection shall solve every one of the 
problems of freedom. ' ' 

"The dependence of Liberty shall be 
lovers. 
The continuance of Equality shall be 
comrades.' 7 

The title of the section subtly repre- 
sents the spirit of the poems. " Walt's 
symbol of manly affection/' says Will- 
iam Sloane Kennedy, — "the sweet flag, 
or calamus, — belongs among the grasses, 
and like them suggests equality and 
brotherhood. It is found in vast masses 
in marshy ground, growing in fascicles 
of three, four, or five blades, which 
cling together for support, shoulder to 
shoulder and back to back, the delicate 
1 pink-tinged ' roots exhaling a faint 
fragrance, not only when freshly gath- 
ered, but after having been kept many 
years." 

It is not surprising that some of the 
poems in this section have presented 
difficulties of analysis to the critics, so 



124 WALT WHITMAN 

subtle is the expression and so mystical 
the thought. Whitman once said to 
Horace Traubel that " Calamus" would 
never be understood until we should 
have developed a race of men and 
women whose love is capable, at times, 
of obliterating all boundaries of sex. 

There is a notion more or less preva- 
lent that Whitman composed very care- 
lessly on the spur of the moment, in 
a sort of haphazard manner. Nothing 
could be farther from the fact. 

" And that he 
Who casts to write a living line must 

sweat, — 
Such as thine are, — and strike the sec- 
ond heat 
Upon the Muses' anvil ; turn the same, 
And himself with it, that he thinks to 
frame." 

In 1899 Dr. Bucke published a large 
quarto volume of Notes and Fragments 
Left by Walt Whitman, which contains 
first drafts and rejected passages from 
Leaves of Grass; notes on the meaning 



WALT WHITMAN 125 

and intention of the same ; memoranda 
from books and from the poet's own 
reflections, indicating his preparatory- 
reading and thought ; and suggestive 
words and expressions, all showing that 
almost every phrase had been thought 
out and carefully considered and recon- 
sidered. Whitman once told John Bur- 
roughs that he had been searching for 
twenty-five years for the word to ex- 
press what the twilight song of the robin 
meant to him. One critic said Whit- 
man u often stumbled" on just the 
right words in just the right order. 
These are the words of which Buskin said 
"they are deadly true — in the sense of 
rifles — against ail our deadliest sins." 
This the author of whom Ingersoll said, 
"He uttered more supreme words than 
any other writer of our century." 
"Stumbled" ! — well, the highest art is 
that which conceals art. 

His own generation of literary men in 
America, with the exception of Emer- 



126 WALT WHITMAN 

son, Thoreau, Alcott, Moncure Conway, 
Charles A. Dana, and a few others — 
some of them important exceptions, to be 
sure — would none of him ; and the pro- 
fessional literary critics were down on 
him to a man. Lowell, Holmes, Whit- 
tier, and most of the New England 
group could see nothing good in the 
book. Bayard Taylor wrote an abusive 
attack on it in the New York Tribune, 
and Whittier threw the 1855 edition 
that Whitman sent him into the fire. 
Most, if not all, of these, however, while 
never becoming reconciled to the book, 
did come to have a genuine and warm 
respect and esteem for Whitman person- 
ally, as is witnessed by their cordial 
messages to him on the occasions of his 
birthday celebrations and in many other 
ways. 

With the younger generation of liter- 
ary men the case is very different j and 
all, almost without exception, not only 
in England and America, but also on the 



WALT WHITMAN 127 

continent of Europe, acknowledge his 
influence, and show it in their writings. 
This is, of course, exactly what was to be 
expected in the case of one who adopted 
such radical departures from recognized 
canons of literary art ; and it is natural 
that professional literary men should be 
the first, last, and most strenuous to re- 
sist such innovations. Even Emerson, 
notwithstanding his enthusiastic letter, 
did not include Whitman in his Parnas- 
sus. Time and distance are necessary 
for the perspective of great objects, — 
witness the case of Shakespeare, to cite 
but one instance, — and the time has not 
even yet come to form a true estimate of 
Whitman's work. The final estimate is 
a matter for the judgment of coming 
centuries. At present it may at least 
be said that all active opposition to his 
work has ceased, and that it is univer- 
sally recognized as a force in American 
thought and letters to be met and dealt 
with. 



128 WALT WHITMAN 

The recent successful production of a 
luxurious subscription edition of The 
Writings of Walt Whitman in ten volumes 
demonstrates a certain kind of success, 
to say nothing of the fact that in that 
edition 98 pages are devoted entirely 
to bibliography. Slurs on Whitman 
now emanate from only a few hack 
writers for newspapers and a few college 
professors of a very crude type, whose 
knowledge of life and the world is 
bounded by their narrow field of aca- 
demic studies. 

Not only are Whitman's works exten- 
sively read in England, but they have 
been translated, either wholly or in 
part, into French by Gabriel Sarrazin, 
into German by Freiligrath, into Danish 
by Eudolph Schmidt, into Dutch by 
Mauritz Wagenvoort, and into Italian 
by Luigi Gamberale. There is also a 
Eussian translation, and the late Sir 
Edwin Arnold translated selections into 
several Asiatic languages. 



WALT WHITMAN 129 

Whitman spun no intellectual cob- 
webs, nor did tie wander in the maze of 
German metaphysics. Nevertheless, he 
is a philosophic thinker; but his views 
seem to be reached rather by intuition 
than by logic. u Logic and sermons 
never convince, " he says. It is not 
probable that he had read Hegel before 
beginning to write; but he read him 
later, and found something in common 
with him, as is implied in the stanza in 
"By the Eoadside,"— 

"Boaniing in thought over the Uni- 
verse, I saw the little that is Good 
steadily hastening towards immor- 
tality, 
And the vast all that is call'd Evil I 
saw hastening to merge itself and 
become lost and dead." 

It is probable that Hegel's idealism 
attracted him, and that his "rule of 
right " — " Be a person, and respect other 
persons" — appealed to him forcibly; 
but it is certain that he did not follow 



130 WALT WHITMAN 

Hegel in such practical applications of 
his philosophy as the absolute supremacy 
of the State, capital punishment, and 
the indissolubility of the marriage rela- 
tion. In Whitman's note-book which 
passed into Dr. Bucke's possession after 
Whitman's death are notes for a lecture 
on Hegel, from which I extract the fol- 
lowing : — 

"Only Hegel is fit for America — is 
large enough and free enough. Absorb- 
ing his speculations and imbued by his 
letter and spirit, we bring to the study 
of life here and the thought of hereafter, 
in all its mystery and vastness, an ex- 
pansion and clearness of sense before un- 
known. As a face in a mirror we see 
the world of materials, nature with all 
its objects, processes, shows, reflecting 
the human spirit and by such reflection 
formulating, identifying, developing 
and proving it. Body and mind are 
one; an inexplicable paradox, yet no 
truth truer. The human soul stands in 



WALT WHITMAN 131 

the centre, and all the universes minister 
to it, and serve it and revolve round it. 
They are one side of the whole and it is 
the other side. It escapes utterly from 
all limits, dogmatic standards and meas- 
urements and adjusts itself to the ideas 
of God, of space, and to eternity, and 
sails them at will as oceans, and fills 
them as beds of oceans.' 7 

In spite of some of the marked re- 
semblances of Whitman's philosophic 
thought to that of Emerson, we have his 
positive word that he had not read 
Emerson until after writing the first 
version of Leaves of Grass ; and yet it is 
there that the resemblance is the most 
marked. 

It has been charged that Whitman's 
verse is uncouth and formless. Let us 
see how the charge has been answered. 
"In the rhythm of certain poets," says 
Emerson, "there is no manufacture, but 
a vortex or musical tornado, which fall- 
ing on words and the experience of a 



132 WALT WHITMAN 

learned mind whirl these materials into 
the same grand order as planets or moons 
obey, and seasons and monsoons. ' y Else- 
where he says, "The difference between 
poetry and stock poetry is this, that in 
the latter the rhythm is given and the 
sense adapted to it, while in the former 
the sense dictates the rhythm." So Car- 
rier e in his work, The Essence and the 
Forms of Poetry, says that in the true 
work of art the form grows out of the 
idea, is its organic outcome. Janna- 
conne has shown this to be the case with 
the poetry of Whitman. In La Poesia 
di Walt Whitman e V Evoluzione delle 
Forme Bitmiehe he says : — 

1 l The rhythm of Whitman has a struct- 
ure and form eminently spiritual like 
primitive poetry. This return toward 
primitive form is in accordance with the 
evolution of the modern poetic form, 
which tends to give increasing predom- 
inance to the logical element. Thus the 
Whitmanic rhythm is free from those 



WALT WHITMAN 133 

characteristics belonging to the modern 
poetic form which distinguish the latter 
from primitive poetry. 

1 ' This greater semblance of the Whit- 
manic rhythm to primitive poetry is due 
to two causes : (a) Not only the rhythm, 
— the formal element, — but also the sub- 
stantial part of Whitman's work, has 
a character in common with the great 
poems of the beginning of civilization. 
A colony that reproduces the primitive 
economical and social forms reproduces 
also the primitive forms of arts. (5) 
The psychic structure of the Whitmanic 
rhythm is, moreover, determined by a 
psycho-physiological factor, — the inde- 
pendence of the thought. " 

John Addington Symonds was cer- 
tainly a competent critic of poetic form, 
and this is what he says in his Walt 
Whitman: A Study: — 

"The countless clear and perfect 
phrases he invented, to match most deli- 
cate and evanescent moods of sensibility, 



134 WALT WHITMAN" 

to picture exquisite and broad effects of 
natural beauty, to call up poignant or 
elusive feelings, attest to his artistic fac- 
ulty of using language as a vehicle for 
thought. They are hung, like golden 
medals of consummate workmanship and 
incised form, in rich clusters over every 
poem he produced. And, what he aimed 
at above all, these phrases are redolent 
of the very spirit of the emotions they 
suggest, communicate the breadth and 
largeness of the things they indicate, 
embody the essence of realities in living 
words which palpitate and burn forever. 
"I do not think it needful to quote 
examples. Those who demur and doubt 
may address themselves to an impartial 
study of his writings. It is enough for 
me, trained in Greek and Latin classics, 
in the literatures of Italy and France and 
Germany and England, who have spent 
my life in continuous addiction to liter- 
erature, and who am the devotee of what 
is powerful and beautiful in style, — it is 



WALT WHITMAN 135 

enough for me to pledge my reputation 
as a critic upon what I have asserted. 7 ' 
Whitman's rhythm is certainly not 
the rhythm of the tom-tom or of "glib 
piano tunes." It is the rhythm of the 
streams, of the ocean billows and the 
breakers on the shore, sometimes of 
the tornado and the thunder-crash. It is 
the rhythm of the great sweeps of country 
and of the open sea, the rhythm of teem- 
ing, tumultuous cities and of myriads 
of bustling industries ; but with the 
clang of factories and the storm of battle 
mingle the wave-beats on Paumanok's 
shore, the bravuras of birds in the for- 
ests, the song of the mocking-bird and 
the hermit thrush, all blended in a 
mighty symphony. The beautiful, gentle 
god walks the old hills of Judea by your 
side in that rhythm. In it America 
arms for the fray which is to be her 
struggle for existence. In it are the 
shrieks and groans of battle, the shouts 
of victory, and the agony of the nation 



136 WALT WHITMAN 

when her martyr- chief falls at the mo- 
ment of triumph and reconciliation. 
And pulsating under all this and through 
all this are the great themes, Individ- 
ualism, Comradeship, and the promise 
of a new and greater Religion, the Re- 
ligion of Democracy. 

So much for the form, but the form is 
but the means to the end ; and the end is 
to help men and women. Has it done 
so I Let Symonds — one among many — 
answer. In his essay on Walt Whit- 
man he declared that Leaves of Grass 
had influenced him more, perhaps, than 
any book except the Bible,— more than 
Plato, more than Goethe. It taught 
him, he said, to comprehend the har- 
mony between the democratic spirit, 
science, and that larger religion to which 
the world is being led by the conception 
of human brotherhood and by the spir- 
ituality inherent in any really scientific 
view of the universe. It inspired him 
with faith, and made him feel that op- 



WALT WHITMAN 137 

timism was not unreasonable. It gave 
him great cheer in evil years of enforced 
idleness, due to ill-health. It opened 
his eyes to the beauty, goodness, and 
greatness which may be found in all 
worthy human beings, the humblest and 
the highest. What Whitman had done 
for him, he felt he will do for others if 
they will only approach him in a spirit 
of confidence and open-mindedness. 

Whitman's ethics is not of the letter, 
but of the spirit. He never preaches. 
With "Thou shalt not" he has no con- 
cern. He knows nothing of arbitrary 
rewards and punishments. He says 
little or nothing of duty. This spirit, is 
nothing that can, be expressed in a for- 
mula or represented by a dogma or 
proved by logic. It is a life, — a life of 
faith without dogma, of acceptance with- 
out argument, of love of nature and of 
man, without exception or limitation. 

"This is what you shall do" : he 
says, "Love the earth and sun and the 



138 WALT WHITMAN 

animals, despise riches, give alms to 
every one that asks, stand up for the 
stupid and crazy, devote your income 
and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue 
not concerning God, have patience and 
indulgence toward the people, take off 
your hat to nothing known or unknown, 
or to any man or number of men — go 
freely with powerful uneducated per- 
sons, and with the young, and with the 
mothers of families — re-examine all you 
have been told in school or church or in 
any book, and dismiss whatever insults 
your own soul ; and your very flesh shall 
be a great poem, and have the richest 
fluency, not only in its words, but in the 
silent lines of its lips and face, and be- 
tween the lashes of your eyes, and in 
every motion and joint of your body." 

He who goes to Walt Whitman for 
definite results or for a formulated sys- 
tem of philosophy or for a crystallized 
plan for social or economic reform or for 
a precise scheme of ontology will be dis- 



WALT WHITMAN 139 

appointed. Whitman does not deal 
with chords of circles. He bristles with 
tangents. "For it is not for what I 
have put into it," he says, "that I have 
written this book, nor by reading that 
you will acquire it." The reader is 
taken into the poet's confidence, into 
partnership. He is given a start, and 
told to go. Whitman answers no ques- 
tions : he asks unanswerable questions. 

"I have no chair, no church, no phi- 
losophy, 

I lead no man to a dinner-table, li- 
brary, exchange, 

But each man and each woman of you 
I lead upon a knoll, 

My left hand hooking you round the 
waist, 

My right hand pointing to landscapes 
of continents and the public road. 

Not I, not any one else can travel 

that road for you, 
You must travel it for yourself. 

"It is not far, it is within reach, 
Perhaps you have been on it since 
you were born and did not know, 



140 WALT WHITMAN 

Perhaps it is everywhere on water and 
on land.' ' 

If thought is not invigorated and hope 
and faith and love stimulated, it is 
naught ; the reader had best put down 
the book, and depart on his way. 

"For all is useless without that which 
you may guess at many times and 
not hit, that which I hinted at." 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 

The standard editions of the works of 
Walt Whitman are published by Small, 
Maynard & Company, Boston, in four 
volumes, as follows : (a) Leaves of Grass 
(containing all of Whitman's poetry), 
(b) Complete Prose Worlcs, (c) Calamus 
(Letters, 1868-1880, to Peter Doyle), 
(d) The Wound Dresser (hospital let- 
ters in war time). The first two of 
these volumes, issued uniform, include 
Whitman's works as published during 
his lifetime, and, with the exception of a 
small section of posthumous additions, 
are an exact reprint of the edition re- 
vised by him upon his death-bed. The 
two volumes of letters were edited by 
Dr. Eichard Maurice Bucke, one of his 
literary executors. 

The contents of these volumes, together 
with some collected fragments of Whit- 
man's writings, variorum readings, and 
very valuable introductory, critical, and 



142 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

bibliographical material contributed by 
Whitman's literary executors and by 
Oscar Lovell Triggs, Ph.D., have re- 
cently been issued in a sumptuous ten- 
volume subscription edition published 
by G. P. Putnam's Sons. 

These two editions are the only ones 
authorized by Whitman's literary ex- 
ecutors; and, as all of Whitman's writ- 
ings since 1876 are still protected by 
copyright, these are the only editions 
now on the market which are in any 
sense complete or to be depended upon 
for accuracy. 

The earlier editions of Leaves of Grass 
are all out of print, most of them are 
scarce, and many of them command a 
high price. As Whitman made many 
alterations in the texts of his various 
editions, all of them are valuable for 
reference and comparison. 

Mention should also be made of Notes 
and Fragments Left by Walt Whitman, 
edited by Dr. Bucke and originally 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 143 

privately published by him in 1899 in 
an edition of 225 copies. The complete 
text of this valuable book has been re- 
printed in the Putnam Subscription 
Edition noted above. 

The authorized volume of selections 
from Whitman is published by Small, 
Maynard & Company, and is entitled 
Selections from the Prose and Poetry of 
Walt Whitman, edited with an Introduc- 
tion by Oscar Lovell Triggs. 

An exhaustive bibliography, covering 
not only all editions of Whitman's works 
and books about Whitman, but also all 
important periodical contributions to 
the subject, has been prepared by Dr. 
Triggs, and is published in Volume X. of 
the Putnam Subscription Edition, where 
it fills 98 octavo pages. Dr. Triggs 
has also published a briefer but still an 
excellent working bibliography in his 
Selections from the Prose and Poetry of 
Walt Whitman. For the present vol- 
ume, therefore, all that is deemed neces- 



144 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

sary is to point out a few of the most 
important books and articles relating to 
Whitman and his work. These are : — 

I. The Good Gray Poet: A Vindi- 
cation. By William Douglas O' Connor 
(New York, 1866). The original bro- 
chure is very scarce, but the entire text 
is reprinted in Dr. Buckets Walt Whit- 
man (See No. IV. below). 

II. A Woman's Estimate of Walt 
Whitman. By Anne Gilchrist. Letters 
to William Michael Bossetti published in 
The Eadical, Boston, May, 1870. Re- 
printed in In Be Walt Whitman (see No. 
V. below). An enthusiastic apprecia- 
tion, especially valuable for its defence 
of the " Children of Adam " poems. 

/ III. Notes on Walt Whitman as 
Poet and Person. By John Burroughs 
(New York, 1867). Contains much in- 
teresting personal information, and was 
written during the days of the author's 
closest intimacy with Whitman. 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 145 

'IV. Walt "Whitman. By Eichard 
Maurice Bucke, M.D. (Philadelphia, 
1883). In addition to being the author- 
ized biography (and the only one 
hitherto issued), this volume is especially 
valuable for containing a history of the 
growth of Leaves of Grass, an analysis of 
Whitman's poetry, an appendix of con- 
temporary criticism, and a reprint of 
O'Connor's The Good Gray Poet 

V. In Ee Walt Whitman. Edited 
by his literary executors, Horace L. 
Traubel, Eichard Maurice Bucke, 
Thomas B. Harned (Philadelphia, 1893). 
Intended by its editors as a supplemen- 
tary volume to Dr. Bucke' s Walt Whit- 
man, this book contains a wealth of 
valuable and interesting material. It 
reprints many important articles about 
Whitman from scarce or inaccessible 
sources, together with translations from 
foreign languages and not a little orig- 
inal matter. 



146 BIBLIOGEAPHY 

^S VI. Walt Whitman : A Study. By 
John Addington Symonds (London, 
1893). Perhaps the finest critical ap- 
preciation of Whitman's work which has 
yet appeared, except for the wretched 
quagmire into which the author has al- 
lowed himself to be led by his morbid 
misinterpretation of a few lines in one 
group of the poems. 

\/ VII. Beminiscences of Walt Whit- 
man, with Extracts from his Let- 
ters AND EEMARKS ON HIS WRITINGS. 
By William Sloane Kennedy (London, 
1896). A delightful volume of person- 
alia, with many glimpses of deep critical 
insight into Whitman's philosophy. 

V VIII. Whitman, a Study. By John 
Burroughs (Boston, 1896). A sane and 
thoroughly appreciative final statement 
after many years of familiarity with 
Whitman and his work. 

IX. Diary Notes of a Visit to 
Walt Whitman and Some of his 



BIBLIOGEAPHY 147 

Friends in 1880. By John Johnston, 
M.D. (Manchester, England, 1898). A 
vivid personal portrait by a close ob- 
server. 

X. The New Spirit. By Havelock 
Ellis (London, 1890) contains an excel- 
lent critical chapter on Whitman, with 
correlative consideration of Emerson and 
Thoreau. 

'XL American Bookmen. By M. A. 
DeWolfe Howe. The chapter on Whit- 
man gives a clear brief critical estimate 
from the viewpoint of one of the yonnger 
critics of the present generation. 

XII. The Conservator. Horace 
Traubel, editor, published monthly in 
Philadelphia. Contains many valuable 
papers relating to Whitman, running 
through the entire period of its existence, 
from 1890 to the present time. 



STANDARD EDITIONS 

OF THE 

WRITINGS OF WALT WHITMAN 



NEW and definitive editions issued under the superintend- 
ence of Whitman's Literary Executors, and prepared 
with careful attention to accuracy and to perfection of 
typography. The only complete and authorized trade editions 
of Whitman's works, and the only such editions which in con- 
tents and arrangement conform with Whitman's wishes and his 
final instructions to his Executors. 

LEA VES OF GRA SS. Including Sands at Seventy, Good- 
Bye my Fancy, Old Age Echoes (posthumous additions), 
and A Backward Glance o'er Travelled Koads. 
Library Edition, 8vo, gilt top, gold decorative, two 

portraits, and index of first lines. Price . . . . $2.00 
The same, Popular Edition, nmo, cloth binding, 

with portrait . 1.00 

The same, paper covers 50 

COMPLETE PROSE WORKS. 

Library Edition, 8vo, gilt top, gold decorative. Five 

full-page illusirations and a facsimile ..... 2.00 
Popular Edition, 121110, cloth, with portrait .... 1.25 
Each of these volumes is uniform with the correspo?id- 
ing edition of " Leaves of Grass.'" 
LETTERS. 

Calamus. Letters to Peter Doyle 1.25 

The Wound Dresser. Hospital Letters in Wartime 1.50 

SELECTIONS FROM THE PROSE AND POETRY 
OF IV ALT WHITMAN. Edited with an intro- 
duction and a brief bibliography by Oscar Lovell 
Triggs, Ph.D. nmo, cloth, with portrait of Walt 
Whitman 1.25 



SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, Publishers. 



The BEACON BIOGRAPHIES. 

M. A. DeWOLFE HOWE, Editor. 



The aim of this series is to furnish brief, read- 
able, and authentic accounts of the lives of those 
Americans whose personalities have impressed 
themselves most deeply on the character and 
history of their country. On account of the 
length of the more formal lives, often running 
into large volumes, the average busy man and 
woman have not the time or hardly the inclina- 
tion to acquaint themselves with American bi- 
ography. In the present series everything that 
such a reader would ordinarily care to know is 
given by writers of special competence, who 
possess in full measure the best contemporary 
point of view. Each volume is equipped with 
a frontispiece portrait, a calendar of important 
dates, and a brief bibliography for further read- 
ing. Finally, the volumes are printed in a form 
convenient for reading and for carrying handily 
in the pocket. 

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, Publishers. 



The BEACON BIOGRAPHIES. 



The following volumes are issued: — 

Louis Agassiz, by Alice Bache Gould. 
John James Audubon, by John Burroughs. 
Edwin Booth, by Charles Townsend Copeland. 
Phillips Brooks, by M. A. DeWolfe Howe. 
John Brown, by Joseph Edgar Chamberlin. 
Aaron Burr, by Henry Childs Merwin. 
James Fenimore Cooper, by W. B. Shubrick Clymer. 
Stephen Decatur, by Cyrus Townsend Brady. 
Frederick Douglass, by Charles W. Chesnutt. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Frank B. Sanborn. 
David G. Farragut, by James Barnes. 
Ulysses S. Grant, by Owen Wister. 
Alexander Hamilton, by James Schouler. 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, by Mrs. James T. Fields. 
Father Hecker, by Henry D. Sedgwick, Jr. 
Sam Houston, by Sarah Barnwell Elliott. 
"Stonewall" Jackson, by Carl Hovey. 
Thomas Jefferson, by Thomas E. Watson. 
Robert E. Lee, by William P. Trent. 
Henry W. Longfellow, by George Rice Carpenter. 
James Russell Lowell, by Edward Everett Hale, Jr. 
Samuel F. B. Morse, by John Trowbridge. 
Thomas Paine, by Ellery Sedgwick. 
Daniel Webster, by Norman Hapgood. 
Walt Whitman, by Isaac Hull Platt. 
John Greenleaf Whittier, by Richard Burton. 



THE WESTMINSTER BIOG- 
RAPHIES. 



The Westminster Biographies are uniform in plan, 
size, and general make-up with the Beacon Biographies, 
the point of important difference lying in the fact that 
they deal with the lives of eminent Englishmen instead 
of eminent Americans. They are bound in limp red cloth, 
are gilt-topped, and have a cover design and a vignette title- 
page by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. Like the Beacon 
Biographies^ each volume has a frontispiece portrait, a 
photogravure, a calendar of dates, and a bibliography for 
further reading. 

The following volumes are issued : — 

Robert Browning, by Arthur Waugh. 

Daniel Defoe, by Wilfred Whitten. 

Adam Duncan (Lord Camperdown), by H. W. Wilson. 

George Eliot, by Clara Thomson. 

Cardinal Newman, by A. R. Waller. 

John Wesley, by Frank Banfield. 



SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, Publishers. 



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